Why do so few women in the U.S. know about the UN women's rights treaty named CEDAW -- the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women? It's essentially an international bill of rights for women that nearly every country has ratified -- except for the United States. If we truly believe in equality of the sexes, then what's stopping us from ratification?
This is the first in a five-part series of interviews with international women's rights expert and CEDAW advocate Kavita N. Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, the largest grantmaking foundation in the world focused exclusively on supporting international women’s human rights.

Below, Ramdas provides insight into CEDAW and why linking women's rights to human rights is necessary.

Why is CEDAW needed? Why make women's rights a human rights issue?

CEDAW is essentially a bill of rights, similar to the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments drafted over 150 years ago that became the foundational document in the women’s suffrage movement.

CEDAW outlined the rights of women according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The authors of CEDAW picked apart the human rights charter with a gender lens to look specifically at the gender specific forms of discrimination, whether it’s economic, political, and social. What makes CEDAW critical to women's lives is that it’s the only document we have that has a globally shared understanding of what a gender lens on human rights looks like.

If the U.S. ratified CEDAW, what benefits/guarantees would women enjoy that are denied to us now?

If CEDAW were ratified, women would not necessarily enjoy new guaranteed benefits immediately.

Rather, women would be able to hold their government accountable for the fulfillment of aspirations that are laid out in CEDAW.

When we look at countries that have ratified CEDAW, it’s not necessarily that the women and girls of those countries enjoy a privileged position or that their experience of their human rights is better or worse than the United States. It’s simply that they are able to use CEDAW as a mechanism to hold their government’s feet to the fire and continue to push them to make incremental and sometimes radical changes in terms of what they’re doing to insure women’s equality and gender justice inside their own society.

Next: What Would Happen if the U.S. Ratified CEDAW?