Good evening.

Uh, my name is Trevor Noah, and it is my profound pleasure to

welcome you to this special event to mark the second year

anniversary of UN Women's HeForShe initiative....Tonight

is a night of stories and storytelling.

These are stories about the global movement to achieve

gender equality and the people who are committed to seeing

it happen.

>> EMMA WATSON: Being a part of HeForShe for the last two years

has been an incredible learning experience for me.

There have been some really hard moments and a lot of

amazing ones.

Ones I never could have imagined.

The UN Secretary General, the entire EU Commission, the NATO

Secretary General, the President of the International Olympic

Committee, numerous heads of state, and politicians from

around the world, including those that you've heard from

tonight, and everyone from Usain Bolt to Tom Hanks are all

now HeForShe.

We've crashed the UN website on multiple occasions--sorry about

that--um, we have lit up the Empire State Building, seeing

HeForShe in Times Square, and made it a term in the

Urban Dictionary.

After 2 billion media impressions, 1.1 million pledged

HeForShes have made practical commitments, as have some of the

world's leading universities and companies to make gender

equality a priority in their--in their work and within their

communities.. In the last two years, if I have learned

anything, if they have shown me anything, it is that nothing,

nothing, is impossible.

>> JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We need women and girls to succeed because

that's how we build stronger, more resilient communities.

It's how we grow a stronger economy.

Encouraging the full participation of women and girls

in public life and in the business world leads to better

decision making all around.

(Speaks French) When women and girls get ahead, everyone does

better in society.

>> EDGAR RAMIREZ: There has now been a misconception that gender

equality is a women's movement, but gender equality is actually

about just that.

Equality.

It is liberation movement for all genders.

It is a liberation movement for each and every person that has

ever felt the burden of a gender stereotype or the pain of

discrimination or the pressure to fit into an

uncomfortable mold...

Men are taught that if we are not the ultimate provider, then

we are a complete failure.

We have to be number one in everything we do.

There's nothing more delusional or more paralyzing than what I

just described.

As a student of the human condition and a man in a macho

normative culture, I've seen firsthand that this paradigm

sets many men and boys up for failure.

To be taught their sadness and fear, anguish and grief, the

very things that make us humans, our feelings, are shameful.

To be encouraged to suppress our humanity and conform to socially

accepted views of what it means to be a man.

To absorb, in our skin, a version of success that is

burdensome, unnatural and excessively competitive.

These distortions come with great consequences for men,

women, and societies as a whole.

>> PHUMZILE MLAMBO-NGCUKA: We are looking for a billion men to

sign up for HeForShe and take the responsibility to create

millions of actions that will make the world better, not just

for women, but also for themselves, because women are

not--w--are not, eh, charity cases, women are change makers

in their own right.

They are leaders of the struggle, and women are offering

men an opportunity to be part of an amazing journey that will

liberate men and society and, of course, will ensure that women

also get their place in the sun.

So, our call to action today is for you to join this movement

and to recruit for us, but this is not about clicking, it is

about the action that you take offline once you have clicked.

>> Bob Moritz: At PwC, we're an organization of 250,000 people

around the world, 158 different countries that we operate in,

and we have a social obligation to make the world better.

Our purpose, our mission, is to help enable trust to be better

than it is today in society and to help solve some very

important problems, this being one of them.

And I'm proud to announce tonight that we're launching

with the UN and the women's initiative a focus around a

curriculum that is free, available to everybody, around

dealing with the unconscious biases or preferences that are

in our day-to-day choices, dialogue, and action.

It's called Building Gender IQ.