Gender-Related Issues Overview

We are now in the ‘decade of delivery’ for the UN’s 17 Sustainable Goals with just nine years remaining before the target date of 2030. 

SDG 5 is “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.”

“Gender equality remains unfinished business in every country of the world. Women and girls have less access to education and healthcare, too often lack economic autonomy and are under-represented in decision-making at all levels. The progress that has been made towards gender equality over the past quarter of a century, though slow and incremental, does however show that change is possible. Legal reform, strengthening gender-responsive social protection and public service delivery, quotas for women’s representation, and support for women’s movements are all strategies that have made a difference and should be scaled up. In the UN Decade of Action to deliver the SDGs, governments, the UN, civil society, and the private sector, working together, have the potential to transform the lives of women and girls, for the benefit of all.” Find out more here.

Recognising the urgency of the task, and the world-changing impact were we to achieve it, the Generation Equality Forum in Paris committed to a five-year Global Acceleration Plan for gender equality, involving targeted action across six main areas: 

• gender based violence; 
• economic justice and rights; 
• bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights;
• feminist action for climate justice
• technology and innovation for gender equality
• feminist movements and leadership

With this roadmap, and the 40 billion USD in pledged funds to support its aims, life for women and girls in 2026 could feel very different. 

It will take all of us, but the lesson of 2021 is impossible to ignore: build back better.

“For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. – If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Amanda Gorman, ‘The Hill We Climb’

(On 20th January 2021, Amanda Gorman, at 22 years old, became the youngest inaugural poet in US history when she recited her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ in Washington for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris)