Written Statement of the Transcultural Nursing Society, submitted to CSW71 in September 2026
Seventy-first Session of the Commission on the Status of Women
Accelerating the Achievement of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of All Women and Girls in the Context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
The Transcultural Nursing Society welcomes the opportunity to contribute to the seventy-first session of the Commission on the Status of Women and its consideration of accelerating gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
As an international professional nursing organization committed to advancing culturally congruent, equitable, and ethically grounded healthcare, the Transcultural Nursing Society recognizes that the health and well-being of women and girls cannot be separated from the cultural, social, economic, political, and environmental contexts in which they live. Progress toward gender equality therefore requires more than universal goals. It requires that policies, health systems, educational institutions, and communities listen to women and girls, understand their lived realities, recognize their strengths, and respond in ways that are culturally meaningful and locally relevant.
The Sustainable Development Goals are deeply interconnected. Gender equality influences, and is influenced by, health, education, poverty, economic opportunity, safe communities, climate resilience, access to resources, and participation in decision-making. Nurses encounter these intersections every day and are uniquely positioned to recognize how social, cultural, economic, and structural factors influence the health and well-being of women and girls. Across communities and countries, nurses accompany women and girls through birth and childhood, reproductive and family life, illness and recovery, aging, displacement, disaster, and death. This proximity creates both an opportunity and a responsibility to recognize inequities that may remain invisible within systems and to advocate for responses grounded in human dignity.
Yet access alone is insufficient. Healthcare may technically exist while remaining inaccessible because of geography, cost, language, discrimination, mistrust, cultural incongruence, or previous experiences of disrespect. Services may be available without being acceptable to the women and communities they are intended to serve. Efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda must therefore move beyond measuring whether services are present and ask whether women and girls can safely reach them, trust them, participate in decisions about them, and receive care that respects their values, identities, families, and communities.
Cultural humility is essential to this work and supports sustained engagement with diverse individuals, families, and communities. It asks health professionals and institutions to move beyond mastering information about groups of people and instead engage in lifelong self-reflection, recognize differences in power, listen before acting, and build authentic partnerships with individuals and communities. Women and girls must not be viewed simply as recipients of policies, programs, or healthcare interventions. They are sources of knowledge whose experiences must inform the design, implementation, evaluation, and improvement of the systems intended to serve them.
Particular attention is needed for women and girls whose voices are underrepresented, including those living in poverty; rural and geographically isolated communities; migrant, refugee, displaced, and Indigenous populations; women experiencing homelessness; women living with disabilities; older women; and those affected by conflict, environmental disruption, disaster, discrimination, and limited access to education and healthcare. An exclusive focus on deficits, however, can reproduce the very inequities we seek to address. Effective policy and practice must identify barriers while also recognizing community knowledge, resilience, relationships, traditions, and other strengths that can support sustainable change.
The Transcultural Nursing Society also emphasizes the importance of investing in nurses and other health professionals as partners in achieving gender equality. Nursing is inseparable from the health of women and girls, yet sustainable progress requires educational pathways, mentoring, professional development, safe and equitable workplaces, and meaningful opportunities for nurses, particularly women, to participate in leadership and decision-making. Strengthening the nursing workforce strengthens communities and expands the capacity of health systems to advance the Sustainable Development Goals.
Accordingly, the Transcultural Nursing Society urges Member States, United Nations entities, healthcare systems, educational institutions, professional organizations, and civil society partners to:
- Center the voices and knowledge of women and girls in the development, implementation, and evaluation of health and social policies and programs, with particular attention to those whose perspectives have historically been excluded.
- Advance culturally congruent and culturally responsive healthcare by addressing not only availability and accessibility, but also the acceptability, trustworthiness, safety, and relevance of services within diverse cultural and community contexts.
- Embed cultural humility and attention to structural inequities within the education and continuing professional development of nurses and other health professionals.
- Invest in women across the health workforce, including educational progression, mentoring, leadership development, equitable working conditions, workforce retention, and opportunities to influence institutional and public policy.
- Strengthen authentic community-academic-health system partnerships that recognize communities as co-creators of knowledge and solutions rather than simply recipients of services.
- Use disaggregated data, together with lived experience and community knowledge, to identify disparities that aggregate measures may obscure and to evaluate whether progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals is reaching women and girls who face the greatest barriers.
- Protect human dignity as a foundational measure of progress and accountability. Policies designed to advance gender equality should be evaluated not solely through numerical outcomes, but also through whether women and girls experience greater agency, respect, belonging, participation, and opportunity.
With 2030 rapidly approaching, acceleration cannot mean simply expanding existing efforts. It requires listening differently, sharing power differently, and designing systems with rather than for the women and communities they are intended to serve.
The Transcultural Nursing Society affirms its commitment to working across cultures, disciplines, professions, and nations to advance gender equality, health equity, human rights, and culturally congruent care. We call upon the global community to ensure that progress toward the 2030 Agenda is reflected not only in policy and indicators, but in the everyday realities of women and girls.