This brief details some of the ways safe city partners from different sectors, in a short six months, have taken action in line with the recommendations set out in UN Women’s Policy brief on COVID-19 and ensuring safe cities and safe public spaces for women and girls.

The brief highlights trends and impacts of COVID-19 on women’s safety in transport. It includes examples of strategies put in place to provide safer transport modes for women and girls throughout the global pandemic, with a focus on availability, accessibility, and affordability, and makes recommendations on how different sectors can contribute to a comprehensive approach to improve women’s mobility.

This brief focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on women and girls in sports in five areas—leadership, gender-based violence, economic opportunities, media participation and representation, and girls’ participation in sport—and presents key recommendations to different actors in the sport ecosystem to respond to the crisis with a gender perspective and recover better in terms of gender equality.

This study serves as an evidence-based instrument that demonstrates how leveraging attitudinal change can be used as a critical tactic towards advancing gender equality. The findings have the potential to inform policymakers, advertisers, private sector leaders, civil society, and decision-makers on challenging discriminatory attitudes and gender roles that perpetuate gender inequality and women’s subordinate status in society.

In an effort to address the impacts of COVID-19, companies are developing a number of socially beneficial communications for the public. It is essential that these communications avoid harmful stereotypes and seek to depict positive and progressive gender portrayals.

This publication illustrates in a practical way how participating cities of the Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces Global Initiative are working to implement women’s safety approaches through the lens of intersectionality. These include a range of women-led solutions, from the creation of data, to integrated policies with meaningful participation of women’s rights organizations, to urban planning solutions that prioritize minoritized women, and prevention initiatives addressing discriminatory behaviours.

This study, based on data from 59 low- and middle-income countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Southern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, finds that women and their families bear the brunt of growing income inequality and failures to adequately plan for and respond to rapid urbanization. The publication examines the effects of multidimensional poverty in urban areas, with women facing greater exposure to life in slum-like conditions than men.

Modern day society is surrounded by media (television, film, radio, print and social media); consuming information, entertainment and ever-increasing channels of communication. These platforms, and the content they deliver, present both unrelenting challenges and incredible opportunities for achieving gender equality and eliminating violence against women and girls. This handbook is designed to provide specific guidance on how to work with media for the achievement of these goals.

This media study is part of UN Women’s EU-funded project, “Promoting and protecting women migrant workers’ labour and human rights: Engaging with international, national human rights mechanisms to enhance accountability”. It focuses on representations of women migrant workers in sending and receiving countries. Articles from newspapers in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and the Philippines are analysed using a gender perspective. Three dominant representations of WMWs are identified: victims, heroes and threats. The implications of these representations are explored and a woman migrant worker–centred approach is recommended.

In this brief, learn more about how the New Urban Agenda strategically supports mainstreaming gender equality and women’s empowerment across all social development goals.