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Towards gender equality and women's economic empowerment, Dr. Victoria Panova, FEFU Vice President for International Relations, joined the Women 20 Forum in Saudi Arabia on January 27-28, 2020.

The Women 20 Forum "Governance and Accountability" continued to emphasize the role of governance, which was addressed in W20 Japan with a vision to transfer W20 recommendations into action by setting smart objectives.

Being the Sherpa of the Russian Federation in W20 since 2015, Dr. Victoria Panova headed the Russian delegation in this Forum, which included role models from Russia, such as Elena Peryshkina, the Executive Director of the AIDS Infoshare and Elena Myakotnikova, the Director of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives.

Among the G20 representatives, there were Dr. Gülden Türktan the Founder of W20, Angela Joo-Hyun Kang the Founder and Executive President of Global Competitiveness Empowerment Forum (GCEF) and Megumi Ishimoto Executive Director, NPO Women’s Eye as well as delegations from international women's organizations, female entrepreneurs, civil society, businesses, and think tanks.

W20 Saudi Arabia session was started by a welcoming speech from Dr. Fahad Almubarak, the Minister of State and Saudi G20 Sherpa. Whereas Dr. Thoraya Obaid, Saudi W20 Chair, and Salma AlRashid, Saudi W20 Sherpa, presented the Forum agenda and stressed the Forum commitment to the W20 mission, which is concentrated on three main pillars: Labor Inclusion, Financial Inclusion, and Digital Inclusion. In addition to the three focus areas, Dr. Thoraya Obaid emphasized the importance of adding Inclusive Decision Making as a fourth pillar to foster women’s participation in decision-making in the political, economic, public, and private sectors by developing more effective and reliable governance mechanisms.

The first part of the Forum was dedicated to analyzing the progress and the actions that were taken to foster gender equality by G20 countries. During the meeting, the delegations drew attention to the importance of enhancing the monitoring and reporting competencies to offer more reliable and comparable data that assist in measuring the progress that had been made on gender equality in the G20 countries.

The second part of the sessions remarked the best practices and identified the areas to develop under the W20 mission to advance gender equity at the global level. Whereas on the final stage of the Forum, the plenary gathered to highlight the three areas of priority for the W20 and shared recommendations.

The Women 20 (W20) was established in 2015 to consul the G20 on fostering gender quality. Over the past five years, W20 main priorities have been directed at empowering women in the digital age and workplace by setting measurable and actionable goals as well as developing effective metrics to improve accountability in measuring progress.

Gender Equality is one of the 17 goals in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which Far Eastern Federal University is adopting and actively promoting in large-scale both national and international events. For instance, in October 2019, FEFU hosted the North-East Asia Multistakeholder Forum on Sustainable Development Goals, where FEFU brought together political elites, academic experts, businessmen to tackle the regional issues towards sustainable development.