SDG 5: Gender Equality

SDG 5: Gender Equality

If your research contributes to meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality add the keyword "SDG 5", "SDG5: Gender Equality" and/or "Sustainable Development Goals" to your article/book/chapter/conference paper/ dataset and we will automatically add it to this rapidly growing collection of research outputs. See the instructions here.

The commitment to advancing gender equality has brought about improvements in some areas, but the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoy full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed remains unfulfilled. The current pandemic is also hitting women and girls hard. Globally, women make up three quarters of medical doctors and nursing personnel. Women already spend three times as many hours as men on unpaid care work at home. The closure of school and day-care centres requires parents, women in particular, to care more for children and facilitate their learning at home. Reports from several countries suggest that domestic violence against women and children is also rising during the global lockdown.

In 2019, one in five young women 20 to 24 years of age throughout the world was married in childhood, down from one in four in 2004 and with the highest figure in sub-Saharan Africa, with more than one in three young women.

At least 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital mutilation, according to recent data from the 31 countries where the practice is concentrated. The harmful practice is becoming less common, but progress is not fast enough to meet the global target of its elimination by 2030.

As at 1 January 2020, representation by women in single or lower houses of national parliament reached 24.9 per cent, up slightly from 22.3 per cent in 2015. Women have better access to decision-making positions at the local level, holding 36 per cent of elected seats in local deliberative bodies, based on data from 133 countries and areas.

In 2019, 28 per cent of managerial positions in the world were occupied by women, a small increase from 25 per cent in 2000, while women represented 39 per cent of the world’s workers and half of the world’s working-age population.

Based on data from 57 countries for the period 2007–2018, only 55 per cent of married or in-union women 15 to 49 years of age made their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights, ranging from less than 40 per cent in Central and Western Africa to nearly 80 per cent in some countries in Europe, South-Eastern Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 2019, in the 75 countries with data, on average, 73 per cent of the laws and regulations needed to guarantee full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights were in place. The findings are particularly encouraging with regard to HIV: on average, countries achieved 87 per cent of enabling laws and regulations for HIV counselling and test services, 91 per cent for HIV treatment and care services and 96 per cent for HIV confidentiality.

Empowering women with mobile telephones has been shown to accelerate social and economic development. However, in the 66 countries with data for the 2016–2018 period, the rate of mobile telephone ownership among men was on average 6.8 percentage points higher than the rate among women.

Source: Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, Report of the Secretary-General, https://undocs.org/en/E/2020/57

Learn more here: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5

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If your research contributes to meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality add the keyword "SDG 5", SDG5: Gender Equality" and/or "Sustainable Development Goals" to your article/book/chapter/conference paper/ dataset and we will automatically add it to this rapidly growing collection of research outputs. See the instructions here: 

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