Ryan W. Miller

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Obama said opportunities for women and girls around the world have greatly improved in the nearly eights years since he took office, but more needs to be done to achieve gender equality.

“I may be a little grayer than I was eight years ago, but this is what a feminist looks like,” Obama said Tuesday at the inaugural White House's United State of Women Summit.

Obama cited recent progress in advancing women's rights and interests, including Hillary Clinton's rise to become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as well as the Equal Pay Pledge, a White House initiative signed by 28 major businesses, including Amazon, PepsiCo and Johnson & Johnson, to work toward company-wide pay equality.

“Progress is not inevitable,” Obama said. “It's the result of decades of slow, tireless, often frustrating and unheralded work.”

Obama praised the successes, but said more work is needed to achieve true gender equality.

“If we really want workplace policies that work for everybody, it would help if we had more women in Congress. It would help if we had more women in the corner suite,” Obama said.

He said current workplace policies are “straight out of Mad Men,” and called for equal pay for equal work, paid family and sick leave, affordable child care and an increase in the minimum wage.

Continued violence against women, especially on college campuses, as well as social stereotypes of how boys and girls should act remain as some of the major problems perpetuating gender inequality, Obama said. And everyone in American can play a role in stopping such discrimination, he added.

Globally, the Obama administration has worked to increase girls’ access to quality education through the Let Girls Learn initiative. Obama said ideologies, such as those of the Taliban or the Islamic State, that suppress women’s rights are often ones that also promote violence and terror.

Despite the need for more progress on women's rights and equality, Obama said the enthusiasm of his daughters’ generation gives him hope.

“They think discrimination is for losers. They think it's weird that we haven't already had a woman president,” Obama said. “They expect the world to catch up to them.”