Note: This story is part of a series of coverage from the first week of the 2026 UN Women’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70). Read Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

Friday marked the fifth and final day of the first week of CSW70, with panels focusing on young women’s roles in peacebuilding, politics, and digital spaces. Across these sessions, one theme rang clear: participation alone is not enough. What matters is power and protection.

Young Women Leading Change

The morning opened with a joint session hosted by Kyrgyzstan, Italy, UN Women, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, focusing on the intersection of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas.

Sarah Hendriks, Director of the Policy, Programme, and Intergovernmental Division at UN Women, focused on the reality facing young women. They are already doing the work as mediators, organizers, and community leaders, yet they remain structurally sidelined. “Participation does not always translate into influence,” she warned, noting that young women are often present in consultations, but absent from the rooms where resources are actually allocated. Their work is also dramatically underfunded, she added, despite its proven impact on conflict prevention and community resilience.

The session highlighted a concern that when the carefully drafted WPS and YPS frameworks develop off-paper in silos, young women risk falling between the two mandates and losing access to funding from either. UN Women’s response has been a joint peacebuilding initiative alongside UNICEF, UNFPA, and UNAOC. A pilot program received 4,500 applications, a figure Hendriks cited as evidence of urgent, unmet demand.

Assistant Secretary-General for Youth Affairs Felipe Paullier described how the world is currently experiencing the highest number of armed conflicts since World War II, and the prevailing global narrative increasingly frames military spending as the only solution. “Young women are builders of peace,” he said, calling on more member states to place young women at the center of peacemaking conversations.

From Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan’s Permanent Representative Aida Kasymalieva highlighted her country’s fifth national action plan on WPS, notable for integrating climate and water security considerations. Kyrgyzstan has status as the only Central Asian nation with a standalone action plan for youth participation in peacebuilding. The OSCE’s Dr. Lara Scarpitta detailed two regional programs, the Young Women 4 Peace Initiative and the Women’s Peace Leadership Program, emphasizing that cross-border, intergenerational collaboration was key to their success.

Italy’s Director General for Political Affairs and Security, Cecilia Piccioni, closed on a note of optimism, announcing the forthcoming launch of Italy’s first national plan on youth, peace, and security. When discussing this plan, she invoked the three guiding pillars she sees as essential to the agenda’s future success: cohesion, innovation, and impact.

Advancing Young Women’s Leadership

Another session focused on political representation and the barriers keeping young women out of politics. It was organized under the WYDE Women’s Leadership initiative with partners including the EU, IPU, UN Women, International IDEA, Portugal, and Sweden.

Sarah Hendriks returned to the podium to note that women aged 30 and under make up just 1.4 percent of all parliamentarians globally. Bina Maseno, Executive Director of Badili Africa in Kenya, added that the figure for young elected women leaders at all levels of politics worldwide sits below 1 percent, with all young people at 2.6 percent. “The challenges we face disproportionately affect young women,” Maseno said, pointing to femicide, unpaid care work, and trafficking as issues that rarely make it into men’s political manifestos precisely because so few women hold office.

Maseno, who ran for office at 22, frankly said that she found passion, skills, and knowledge were not enough to navigate political environments that were never built for women. She ended her message by quoting the President of Liberia from 2006 to 2018 and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf:

Full political participation will become a reality for us, as women, when quotas and set-asides become a relic of the past; when our access in participatory institutions at all levels is considered a right; and when we no longer feel compelled to wage campaigns and stage protests in order to have a say in the decisions that affect our lives – be it at the peace table or in the political and economic arenas.

Ruth Cross-Kwansing, Minister for Women, Youth, Sports and Social Affairs in Kiribati and a sitting Member of Parliament, named the three forces most likely to push women out before they even enter politics: family pressure, financial constraints, and fear. “What we are stepping into is not an easy world,” she said, we must dig deeper than men must, with no one’s shoulders to stand on and no one behind us but ourselves.

On structural solutions, IPU Turkish Delegate Fatma Öncü called on parliaments to act on three fronts: establish formal mentorship programs, implement gender quotas, and guarantee that no woman should have to choose between serving her democracy and protecting her dignity. The same session also heard Swedish Youth Delegate Lydia Korsgren, representing Save the Children, where she sits on a committee whose members’ ages range from 12 to 24. She urged a shift away from tokenism, a practice she described as including young people only after decisions have already been made. “Nothing about young women without young women,” she said.

The session closed with the unveiling of International IDEA’s Young Women’s Empowerment Portal, a new digital resource designed to amplify women’s political participation globally. Principal Adviser Rumbidzai Kandawasvika-Nhundu offered a reframe of the current narrative to end her remarks, “The problem is not the underrepresentation of women. It is the overrepresentation of men.”

Digital Public Life

An afternoon session, organized by the EQUALS Global Partnership with the UK, ITU, UN Women, UNICEF, and W4, confronted the mounting threat of online violence as a barrier to women’s public participation.

UN Women Senior Policy Advisor Jayathma Wickramanayake reported that 70 percent of women human rights defenders, journalists, and media workers have experienced online violence, and for 41 percent of them, that digital abuse escalated into real-world attacks. During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, nine out of ten instances of online harassment were directed at women athletes.

Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Dr. Anna Cody argued that the framing of online harm must change. For many women, an online presence is not optional; it is essential for economic and civic participation. “It is no longer realistic to frame this violence as not real,” she said. Cody pointed to Australia’s eSafety Commission, the world’s first online safety regulator, as a model for a “safety by design” approach that shifts responsibility from individual users to the platforms that profit from their engagement.

Belgium’s Deputy Permanent Representative Bart De Wolf outlined systemic risks: algorithms that replicate and amplify existing inequalities, digital infrastructure that enables gender-based violence without adequate safeguards, and platforms that perpetuate misogyny. He noted that online harm restricts women’s voices and leadership by silencing them and delegitimizing their leadership. His conclusion was blunt: “Online safety is not a luxury, but the infrastructure that makes participation equal.”

ITU’s Ursula Wynhoven noted that while progress on the gender digital divide has been made, it is not happening fast enough. Roughly 20 million fewer women than men are currently online. Last year’s launch of EQUALS 2.0, with a goal of empowering 100 million girls as active digital participants, represents the partnership’s most ambitious target yet.

A Week Worth Noting

Whether the topic was conflict zones, parliamentary chambers, or social media feeds, the first week on CSW70 kept returning to the same structural fault line: the gap between presence and power. Young women are showing up in peace negotiations, in political campaigns, and in digital spaces, but the systems surrounding them were not built with them in mind. The sessions made clear that closing that gap will require more than invitations. It will require funding, legal protections, quotas, mentorship, and a willingness to redesign the institutions themselves.