5.1: End discrimination against women and girls

5.2: End all violence against and exploitation of women and girls

5.3: Eliminate forced marriages and genital mutilation

5.4: Value unpaid care and promote shared domestic responsibilities

5.5: Ensure full participation in leadership and decision-making

5.6: Universal access to reproductive rights and health

5.A: Equal rights to economic resources, property ownership and financial services

5.B: Promote empowerment of women through technology

5.C: Adopt and strengthen policies and enforceable legislation for gender equality

To achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Women and girls represent half of the world’s population and therefore also half of its potential. But, today gender inequality persists everywhere and stagnates social progress.

Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership.

Advancing gender equalty is critical to all areas of a healthy society, from reducing poverty to promoting the health, education, protection and the wellbeing of girls and boys.

Across the globe, women and girls perform a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic work.

Inequalities faced by girls can begin right at birth and follow them all their lives. In some countries, girls are deprived of access to health care or proper nutrition, leading to a higher mortality rate.

Women’s and girls’ empowerment is essential to expand economic growth and promote social development. The full participation of women in labour forces would add percentage points to most national growth rates – double digits in many cases.

Worldwide, 35 per cent of women between 15-49 years of age have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. 1 in 3 girls aged 15-19 have experienced some form of female genital mutilation/cutting in the 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, where the harmful practice is most common with a high risk of prolonged bleeding, infection (including HIV), childbirth complications, infertility and death.

International commitments to advance gender equality have brought about improvements in some areas: child marriage and
female genital mutilation (FGM) have declined in recent years, and women’s representation in the political arena is higher than ever before. But the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality, and where all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled.

There has been progress over the last decades: More girls are going to school, fewer girls are forced into early marriage, more women are serving in parliament and positions of leadership, and laws are being reformed to advance gender equality. 

How to solve the problem?

If you are a girl, you can stay in school, help empower your female classmates to do the same and fight for your right to access sexual and reproductive health services. 

If you are a woman, you can address unconscious biases and implicit associations that form an unintended and often an invisible barrier to equal opportunity.

If you are a man or a boy, you can work alongside women and girls to achieve gender equality and embrace healthy, respectful relationships.

Connection with other goals

• poverty reduction and hunger eradication: employing women will reduce their poverty and increase financial independence (goal 1 and goal 2)
• quality education for girls (goal 4) will give them the opportunity to continue their education and be present in the labor market, which will affect economic growth (goal 8), and in all legal and political institutions (goal 16) in which they can advocate for Gender Equality and Inequality Reduction (Goal 10)
• have quality living conditions (goal 6) and health care (goal 3)