Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
So far we have looked at how Goals 1 and 2 of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals are working to eliminate world hunger and make sure that all children have access to primary education. While these as well as many of the other MDGs will have a major impact on all people, male of female, there are certain issues where women are more adversely affected than men. Vulnerability to domestic violence and a tendency to work in less secure forms of employment are just two examples of the kind of inequalities that women today face the world over. And such areas of disparity are what Goal 3 of the MDGs hopes to address. We will look now in greater detail at what kind of issues this third goal hopes to tackle, and what is being done to tackle global gender inequality.
In order to achieve the more general goal of promoting gender equality, the UN has set the following concrete target:
“Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.”
Securing an education for young women has been singled out as the best way of eliminating issues relating to gender equality further along in people’s lives. Since the MDGs were established in the year 2000, the gap between the number of boys and girls attending school has narrowed, and the UN now believes that it has eliminated inequalities linked to the attendance of boys and girls at primary school level.
However, it admits that this has not yet been achieved in further stages of education, particularly at university level. According to the UN, “In Southern Asia, only 77 girls per 100 boys are enrolled in tertiary education. The situation is most extreme in sub-Saharan Africa, where the gender gap in enrollment has actually widened from 66 girls per 100 boys in 2000 to 61 girls per 100 boys enrolled in 2011.”
Poverty is cited as being the main cause for this gap, as many women miss out on higher education due to commitments in the home and issues such as teenage pregnancy. This lack of education inevitably has an impact later down the line, and women worldwide are far more likely than men to end up in jobs where they have limited job security and access to social benefits. Indeed, the UN calculates that worldwide, “women occupy only 25 per cent of senior management positions”, not to mention the lack of females in positions of political power.
So what is being done? There are many UN-affiliated initiatives being carried out throughout the world to address the issue of gender disparity, from scholarship schemes in Somalia and the training of female teachers to educate Yemini girls in rural areas, to a Brazilian app that aims to help women suffering from domestic abuse. Other groups such as UNGEI (UN Girls’ Education Initiative) and the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women are also working to reverse gender inequality by supporting and funding action on both a local and national scale. For more information on what is being done to achieve goal 3 click here.
