Women's Empowerment

Gender-sensitive reporting and the Millennium Development Goals

Gender experts and advocates have suggested several concrete ways to make the MDG implementation and reporting process more gender-sensitive. Two complementary approaches include adding targets and indicators to Millennium Development Goal No. 3 (on gender equality and women’s empowerment), and disaggregating the targets and indicators for the other goals by gender.

The UN Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality* suggests that national governments add additional targets, beyond the education target, under the gender equality and women’s empowerment goal. Recommended targets include:

• Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health services through the primary health care system;
• Eliminate gender inequality in access to assets and employment;
• Achieve a 30 percent share of seats for women in national parliaments;
• Reduce by half the lifetime prevalence of violence against women.

The task force also suggests that national governments add additional indicators for tracking progress towards the gender goal. Their recommendations include:

• Completion rates (in addition to enrolment rates) for primary and secondary school;
• Economic indicators such as gender gaps in earnings, sex-disaggregated unemployment rates and occupational segregation by sex;
• Prevalence rates for domestic violence in the past year.

Another option is to add at least one gender-specific indicator not just to the gender goal, as suggested above, but also to the set of indicators for all the goals and targets. A recent UNDP review of National MDG Reports** argues that adding more indicators for each and every target, ideal though it would be, is not feasible given country capacity and workload considerations as well as the availability of data. Instead, the report recommends providing sex-disaggregated data and qualitative information on gender issues across goals and targets, and gives practical suggestions on how to do so:

• Involve women’s groups and gender experts in consultations on all the goals;
• Support independent studies using rapid participatory methodologies to collect qualitative information on key gender dimensions of goals and targets;
• Share draft reports with independent gender experts for review;
• Support efforts to sensitize statisticians involved in collating and processing MDG tracking data to the gender dimensions of the mandatory indicators under each goal;
• Support the collection of sex-disaggregated data;
• Provide training to country teams and others involved in the MDG reporting process.

** National Reports, a Look Through a Gender Lens: http://www.undp.org/docs/mdgs-genderlens.pdf

Download this entire section in one PDF document, "Gender and the Millennium Development Goals."