The 1992 Rio Conference, for example, attracted enormous attention worldwide and gave value to the work of environmentalists. That is to say, confidence not only to believe in themselves but to be believed in by others. The call for equal rights before the law is therefore, unsurprisingly, a key conference theme. Another theme is reproductive rights for women - without which women can never be equal with men. The Conference could do well to re-iterate the gains of the 1994 Cairo Population and Development Conference, where the population hot potato was finally acknowledged to be a matter of human rights and not merely national demographics.
Economic rights are a third essential theme.
By this ruse men have kept the purse-strings in their own hands, bamboozling women into dependence on their goodwill. Even now, conventional banks will often not lend money to women without their husbands' signature - on the assumption that only men, of course, would have access to collateral.