- published: 13 Apr 2012
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International Women's Year (IWY) was the name given to 1975 by the United Nations. Since that year March 8 has been celebrated as International Women's Day, and the United Nations Decade for Women, from 1976–1985, was also established.
The first World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City from June 19–2 July . The 1975 conference and IWY were part of a larger United Nations program which developed over the Decade of Women (1976–85), and included the drafting and of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), agreed at the second conference in 1979. The 1985 third conference in Nairobi, Kenya not only closed the decade of women, but set a series of member state schedules for removal of legislated gender discrimination in national laws by the year 2000. The 1973-5 planning of the IWY, led by Assistant Secretary General for Social and Humanitarian Affairs Helvi Sipila was very much influenced by the rise of Second Wave Feminist movements throughout the developed world in the early 1970s. Delegates sought to deepen these advances in legal recognition of female equality and bring them to the developing world, and promote the role of women as an aid for economic development.
The Fourth World refers to
Fourth World follows the First World, Second World, and Third World hierarchy of nation-state status; however, unlike the former categories, Fourth World is not spatially bounded, and is usually used to refer to populations whose size and shape does not map onto citizenship in a specific nation-state. It can denote nations without a sovereign state, emphasising the non-recognition and exclusion of ethnically- and religiously-defined peoples from the politico-economic world system, e.g. the Romani people worldwide, the Basque, Sami, pre-First World War Ashkenazi Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the Assyrians, and the Kurds in the Middle East, Pashtun throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, the indigenous peoples of the Americas and First Nations groups throughout North, Central and South America, and indigenous Africans and Asians. Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication has made extensive use of the term fourth world'.