 Today, we are launching a campaign called He For She. I am reaching out to you because we need your help. We want to end gender inequality. And to do this, we need everyone involved. About engaging governments, businesses and universities and having them make concrete commitments to gender equality. Hello everybody and welcome. Good afternoon Facebook fans. We are live from the Facebook offices in Central London on International Women's Day. It's got to be your story. It's got to be how you personally can make a difference. The smallest gesture goes such a long way. In your hands, turning to you to help us create a world in which gender is just a spectrum of beauty and not limitation. Increasing the representation of women all across the company and all across the globe in both technology positions and also in leadership positions. Women actually not only contribute in terms of participating in the labor force, they drive entrepreneurship. The world is women and they're not included in this same conversation. I'll leave my letter to her. That's how he for she is. Okay, that's for me. Yo, it's Lynn and I have to laugh. How can we not be equal? We're like half. Like women are like half of the people on earth. And yes, they should have been cut equal since birth. We believe that students should leave university believing in, striving for and expecting societies of true equality. And part of this liberation movement requires that we call out and break down these social norms and barriers to our well-being so that we may all be free to be our true selves. There's power in embracing everything we feel. These traits don't make us a man or a woman. They make us human. Of defining moments, moments that overwhelm us with joy and those that shatter us to a very core. And if we are lucky, if we are one of the few lucky ones, during our darkest moments, we are somehow still able to clearly see the not-so-obvious good to fully comprehend that nothing about our misfortune is accidental and that everything with all its imperfections needed to happen just the way it did. For it is during our moments of utter despair that we find the courage to change things. Our pain becomes the passion that propels us forward, shaping us into the people we become. And as we change through these experiences, we in turn change the world around us. I am one of the lucky few ones. At the age of eight, I experienced my first near-death experience. I was living with my grandmother when famine struck, leaving us near to starvation. And through a series of events that ensued, I would come to learn about the complexities of inequality, how intertwined it is, how the constraints that burdened my village would eventually burden me, how one could both be equal and unequal all at the same time. I would come to learn that just as the opposite of love is in hate, the absence of equality isn't always of men's fault. And through this realization, I found my first defining moment that shaped the way I saw the world. Life is made up of a series of defining moments. September 20th marked another defining moment when you and women, the United Nations Global Entity for Gender Equality, launched what would become one of the most important social movements in the world, called HeForShe. HeForShe flipped the script on gender equality, recognizing it not just as a woman's issue, but also a man's issue. Clearly seeing that, as long as the pursuit of gender equality remains a struggle between men and women, no one wins. No one wins, because the constraints that burden women eventually burden men and vice versa. So we invited men and boys as equal partners to create societies of equality. Within five days, at least one man in every single country in the world joined HeForShe, generating more than 1.2 billion conversations on social media. And through their actions, men and boys everywhere created HeForShe, a global solidarity movement for gender equality, redefining everything that we ever thought possible. Life is made up of a series of defining moments. Three years after the launch of HeForShe, we are now working on a transformative agenda with global heads of states, with CEOs, with university presidents, to create tangible and scalable solutions for gender equality. We have begun to document emerging proven practices on how to achieve equal pay for a cooperation of 3,000 people as part of our work with our champion alcohol hotels. In Iceland, we are creating a blueprint on how to achieve equal pay at a country level by 2020 for all citizens. Our champion price waterhouse coopers who are over there have also shown the world that the idea that gender parity cannot be achieved at a senior leadership is not real. In the past 15 months, PWC have moved their data point of female leadership from 18% to 47%. And soon the HeForShe solution on how to do this will now be scaled and tested in other companies. We have gained practical knowledge on how to end child marriage thanks to the power of the commitment of the president of Malawi, our HeForShe champion, who has now outlawed child marriage within his country, which has resulted in the annulment of 3,500 child marriages in the past 12 months and the return back to school of 1,200 girls. We have redefined with HeForShe what accountability means and what it looks like. With our champion McKinsey, we have been able as part of their HeForShe commitment to finally release the gender parity data for the first time in the company's 98 history. In Silicon Valley, we have taken HeForShe into virtual space and working with Electronic Arts to look at how we can create safe online spaces for all of us. We are also looking at removing ceilings that should have never been there to begin with with our champion University of Waterloo through the implementation of HeForShe Impact Scholarship which are geared towards getting more young girls into STEM subjects. And lastly here in Finland, the president of Finland is one of our champions and through his commitment, Finland will end gender-based violence which currently impacts one in three Finnish women. This is just the tip of the iceberg on our work with HeForShe to create transformation so we can accelerate the achievement of gender equality in our lifetime. But we can't do it alone. We need everyone to be involved. Life is defined by a series of moments. In 1985, an African leader called Thomas Sankara was asked about his political philosophy and he said, you cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from non-conformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future. To the men in the room today, you are one of the lucky ones. And like Sankara, we are asking you to dare to invent the future by creating inclusive work places that are welcoming to women and other genders by prioritizing progressive policies such as parental leave that liberate men from outdated nations, outdated nations of what it means to be a man. CEOs, we need you to join our Fortune 500 CEOs who are creating transformation and also creating an important legacy that looks at how can they be part of ending what remains to be one of the biggest injustices in the world, the inequality of the genders. Life is made up of a series of defining moments. And I hope that today serves as your own defining moment, a moment you realize how connected we are, a moment you realize that no one is going to be equal until we're all equal. A moment that inspires you to take action and dare to invent the future. Thank you. As a girl, I'm expected to be your little princess. As a boy, I'm expected to be your hero. I'm supposed to play with dolls and look pretty. I'm supposed to play sports and act tough. Crying makes people think I'm hormonal. Crying makes people think I'm unique. If I spend more time at work than at home, I lack devotion. If I spend more time at home than at work, I lack devotion. People will question my sexuality if I choose to join the army. People will question my sexuality if I choose to be a nurse. I'm expected to define myself as a boy or as a girl.