Melanne Verveer Quotes
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My major obligation or responsibility is to work to integrate gender issues throughout the work of the State Department.
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We know that the most dangerous places in the world are more often than not the most dangerous places for women, where women are denied their rights and oppressed. These are the places that are unstable and where extremism often takes hold.
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I have seen businesses and government come together to provide women entrepreneurs with the training they need to better access markets, take advantage of trade agreements, and in the process grow businesses, jobs, and GDP. These are partnerships that transform lives.
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The role of business in advancing women's rights is growing, particularly in the area of economic opportunity including opening access to training, mentoring, networks, markets, technology and even to capital in some circumstances.
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In India, at the community level, young men are playing an absolutely essential role in changing the cultural norms and deeply held practices concerning women. They are doing this in a way that not only empowers women and girls, but really empowers the young men as well.
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For me, leadership is making a difference. It's using your agency to bring about change.
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Over time, I've come to recognize what others bring to the table, and I've developed a much more team-based approach. There's the saying that there is no end to what one can achieve if one doesn't have to take the credit for what was achieved.
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Studies demonstrate that as gaps are being closed between men and women - in access to education, in health, even in economic participation - the most difficult gap to close is in political participation. Somehow that sharing of raw power, political power, remains very illusive.
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Politics is rough and tumble everywhere, and many women recoil from that negative aspect of it - the nastiness, the charges and counter-charges.
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There is certainly a growing body of data that correlates investments in women with a country's general prosperity; a recognition that no country can get ahead if half its people are left behind.