The gaze of the
World Women’s Observatory (WWO)

Just as we can hear without listening, we can also see without looking. An Observatory, on the other hand, consists of an attentive gaze that stops before what it sees and hears and delves into that reality as if it were focusing on the eyes of the person in front of it. If we broaden “our gaze, but starting from the eyes of the poor person in front of us [...] we are looking at reality in a different way from our own mentality” (Pope Francis, 26 June 2021).

The World Women’s Observatory (WWO), a project of the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations (WUCWO), tries to listen and look at women from different regions of the planet, particularly the most vulnerable, who do not have the power to speak out or, if they do, it may be that nobody notices and that their expressions are diluted in the sea of globalisation ofindifference.

The objective of the WWO is to give visibility to women, especially the most vulnerable, who seem “invisible”, both in terms of their suffering and their potential, in order to inspire and generate pastoral strategies on the part of the Church, synergies on the part of civil society NGOs, public policies on the part of States and contributions to the international agenda, which favour the integral human development of women and that of their families, communities and peoples.

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THE WWO AIMS TO: 

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• eradicate all forms of violence and discrimination against women, in order to establish, in
  practice, equal rights for men and women;

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• apply and promote the principle of solidarity and the cultivation of community ties
  highlighting the role of women; and

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• generate a culture of care in which women’s leadership, well-known throughout history,
  emerge as a new form of exercise of citizenship.

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