Submission to the Report on Gender, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
Gender is a harmful social construct, which is called in CEDAW, ‘stereotyped
roles’. Indeed, Article 5 of CEDAW says that ‘States Parties shall take all appropriate
measures’, ‘To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with
a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices
which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or
on stereotyped roles for men and women.’ Sex stereotypes are not something to be
celebrated but to be abolished in order to create women’s equality.