Women's Empowerment

Why gender matters to the Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are an integrated set of eight goals and 18 time-bound targets for extending the benefits of globalization to the world’s poorest citizens. The goals aim to stimulate real progress by 2015 in tackling the most pressing issues facing developing countries – poverty, hunger, inadequate education, gender inequality, child and maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation. UNDP helps countries formulate national development plans focused on the MDGs and chart national progress towards them through the MDG reporting process.

In most developing countries, gender inequality is a major obstacle to meeting the MDG targets. In fact, achieving the goals will be impossible without closing the gaps between women and men in terms of capacities, access to resources and opportunities, and vulnerability to violence and conflict.

Millennium Development Goal No. 3 promotes gender equality and empowers women. UNDP's aim is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015. Four indicators are used to measure progress towards the goal:

• the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education;
• the ratio of literate women to men in the 15- to 24-year-old age group;
• the share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and
• the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments.

The existence of a separate goal on gender equality is the result of decades of advocacy, research and coalition-building by the international women’s movement. Its very existence demonstrates that the global community has accepted the centrality of gender equality and women’s empowerment to the development paradigm – at least at the rhetorical level.

Yet the gap between rhetoric and reality persists: the 2005 primary and secondary school parity target will likely be missed. But even if it were achieved, it is hardly sufficient to ensure the full participation of women in the political and economic lives of their countries. Much more is needed: full reproductive health rights and access to services, guarantee of equal property rights and access to work, affirmative action to increase political representation, and an end to violence against women and girls. To realize the MDGs, governments and their partners must seriously and systematically ‘engender’ efforts to achieve all the goals. But today, the gender focus is largely limited to the gender equality, maternal mortality, and HIV/AIDS goals – leaving out critical development issues such as the feminization of poverty, the preponderance of female-headed households among the hungry, and the lopsided impact of environmental degradation on women (particular in terms of time spent gathering fuel and hauling water).

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