Gender equality: Distant, yet achievable

“Today’s report reveals the undeniable truth: progress is achievable, but is not fast enough,” said Sima Bahous, UN Women Executive Director.

“Let us unite to continue dismantling the barriers women and girls face and forge a future where gender equality is not just an aspiration but a reality,” she added.

The Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, are an internationally agreed set of targets to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure peace and prosperity for all by 2030.

While there are some promising trends towards achieving certain SDGs in the report - including declining poverty, narrowing of gender gaps in education and a push for positive legal reforms - just six years before the 2030 deadline, not a single indicator under Goal 5, gender equality, has been fully achieved.

Where was there the most progress?

Among the strides made towards gender equality, women hold a quarter of all parliamentary seats, a significant rise from a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the share of women and girls living in extreme poverty has finally dipped below 10 per cent following steep increases during the COVID-19 pandemic years.

The percentage of women aged 20-24 who were married before reaching18 has also decreased, from 24.1 per cent in 2003 to 18.7 per cent today.

There have been up to 56 legal reforms enacted worldwide that seek to close the gender gap since the first Gender Snapshot report was released in 2019.

One significant legal reform highlights that countries with domestic violence legislation have lower rates of intimate partner violence – 9.5 per cent compared to 16.1 per cent for those without.

Critical gaps remain

Despite progress in certain areas, none of the indicators and sub-indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 5—the goal for gender equality—are being met according to the report.

At current rates, gender parity in parliaments remains a distant dream, potentially not achievable until 2063. Moreover, it will still take a staggering 137 years to lift all women and girls out of poverty. And about 1 in 4 girls continue to be married as children.

The report also stresses the astonishing cost of gender inequality. For example, the annual global cost of countries failing to adequately educate their young populations is over USD 10 trillion. Low- and middle-income countries can lose another USD 500 billion in the next five years by not closing the digital gender gap.

“The costs of inaction on gender equality are immense, and the rewards of achieving it are far too great to ignore. We can only achieve the 2030 Agenda with the full and equal participation of women and girls in every part of society,” said Li Junhua, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.

As world leaders prepare for the Summit of the Future on 22 and 23 September, UN Women is calling on them to forge new international consensus to close the gender gap, achieve gender equality and advance the empowerment and rights of all women and girls, a goal which is “distant but achievable”.