SDG 5 - Gender Equality explained

?? Article written by Peter Gringinger, sustainability expert and facilitator of the SDGs Multipliers Online Training course, by Gaia Education.

Mark your calendars for January 31st! ?? Peter will be hosting a free webinar and workshop on Gaia Education’s SDGs Toolkit for Designing Community Projects. Don’t miss this opportunity to join live on Zoom, enhance your skills in sustainability, and deepen your understanding of the SDGs. Best of all—it’s completely FREE! ????

Register now to secure your spot!

Hi #sustainability champions, today we continue our? journey exploring the individual SDGs one by one to polish our knowledge and upskill in SDG learning. As mentioned before we send out a post approximately once or twice weekly until we have gone through all 17 SDGs. Today we tackle? SDG 5 - Gender Equality. You can follow or connect with us and see what we have to offer related to upskilling your change maker abilities (of tools and training) on our SDG toolkit webpages. ?

So let’s explore Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5), also known as? "Gender Equality" in a concise manner suitable for learning.

What is SDG 5 about?

Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5) is a global commitment to "achieve gender equality and empower women and girls." It’s about ending discrimination, violence, and harmful practices against women and girls, recognizing and valuing unpaid care, ensuring women’s participation in leadership, providing access to reproductive health, and more

Why does SDG 5 matter?

Gender equality is super important because when women and girls get the same opportunities as men and boys, everyone benefits. It leads to healthier families, better economies, and more sustainable and peaceful societies. Achieving gender equality is crucial to realizing many of the SDGs - after all you cannot expect to achieve any global goal if half the world’s population is not fully empowered. SDG 5 looks at all dimensions of gender equality and empowering all women and girls.

Women’s rights are basic human rights that all women and girls have. But in practice, these rights are often not protected to the same extent as the rights of men. We are still far away from reaching gender equality in economic, political, public and private lives of women and girls.?

Among others, women’s rights include: physical integrity rights, such as being free from violence and making choices over their own body; social rights, such as going to school and participating in public life; economic rights, such as owning property, working a job of their choice, and being paid equally for it; and political rights, such as voting for and holding public office.

The protection and enforcement of these rights allows women to live the lives they want and to thrive in them.

• The dismantling of discriminatory laws, including general laws on gender equality, on violence against women, on employment and economic benefits and marriage and family,? is encouraging but significant gaps persist, notably in land rights and on economic equality
• Existing evidence shows that the prevalence of intimate partner violence including sexual violence, in all forms, is higher among women with disabilities than those without disabilities and can affect more than 40% of woman in some countries.
• Child marriage and female genital mutilation violate the rights of girls and have lifelong consequences, the latter most prevalent in sub-saharan Africa. An estimated 640 million girls and women were married in childhood globally, with one third in India alone, even though some progress has been made.
• From legislatures to corporate boards, women have made limited gains in leadership 26.9 percent of seats in national parliaments, up from 22.3 per cent in 2015 and relatively similar numbers exist for women in management positions even though women hold 40 % of the global employment.
• Despite variations across regions and country-specific differences, women in general perform most unpaid domestic and care work. This disproportionate burden is amplified in lower-income households, contributing to poverty, inequality and precariousness, including by limiting labour market participation.
• Data from 69 countries show that 56 percent of married or in-union women aged 15?49 can decide on their sexual and reproductive health and rights, ranging from 38 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa to over 80 per cent in Europe. Although 89 per cent of women can autonomously decide to use contraception, one in four cannot make health-care decisions or say no to sex. Sub-saharan Africa faces the most frequent issues? in this area.?

Key targets and indicators??

SDG 5 is defined by 9 targets, which? are measured by 14? indicators, ensuring progress can be tracked and goals can be met, that look at all dimensions of gender equality including economic, political and societal inclusion and participation; eliminating violence and harmful practices against women; and ensuring sexual and reproductive health. Some of the main targets summarised include (if you want to know the exact lengthy wording in the Agenda 2030 you should have a look here):

• End all forms of discrimination everywhere
• Remove all forms of violence (including sexual) against women and girls everywhere including human trafficking
• Acknowledge and support unpaid care work?
• Equal opportunities for women to take on leadership roles
• Access to sexual and reproductive health and rights
• Ensure self determination and equal rights of full participation in all aspects of life and resources to achieve this
• Empowerment through technology
• Strengthen equality rights in law and practice

Challenges & Progress:?

We've made some progress, like more girls going to school and more women in politics. But there are still big problems, like laws and customs that treat women unfairly, even in progressive liberal democracies like in most of Europe or the USA. Gender bias is undermining our social fabric and devalues all of us. It is not just a human rights issue; it is a tremendous waste of the world’s human potential. By denying women equal rights, we deny half the population a chance to live life at its fullest. Political, economic and social equality for women will benefit all the world’s citizens.

"It's high time, that we recognize all genders on the same spectrum, not as opposing ideas." Emma Watson, Actress and Ambassador of the UN Women HerforShe Campaign

The world continues to lag in its pursuit of gender equality by 2030. Harmful practices are decreasing but not at a rate keeping up with population growth. One in five girls still marry before age 18. A staggering 230 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital mutilation. Far too many women still cannot realize the right to decide on their sexual and reproductive health. Violence against women persists, disproportionately affecting those with disabilities.

Parity in women’s participation in public life remains elusive, and in management positions, at current rates, parity will require another 176 years. Women carry an unfair burden of unpaid domestic care work, spending 2.5 times more hours a day on it than men.

Strong and sustained commitments to changing biased social norms, eliminating harmful practices and abolishing discriminatory laws are urgently needed. Enhancing women’s roles in leadership and decision-making and adequately scaling up investments in gender equality on national, regional and global scales are top priorities.

Overall the latest UN SDG progress report on SDG 5 shows either stagnation (woman in leadership)? or at best marginal progress (legal frameworks, early marriage, gender responsive budgeting), with substantial data gaps so far, but certainly significant acceleration is required on many SDG 5 targets, with a particular focus on sub-saharan Africa, but also South Asia and the Middle East and overall way off track to reach the 2030 targets. Globally, about 129 million girls are out of school, with significant disparities in access to education, especially in low-income countries. As of 2023, women hold approximately 26% of parliamentary seats worldwide, indicating slow progress in political representation.An estimated 1 in 3 women globally have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, emphasizing the urgent need for protective measures. Women's labor force participation is around 47%, compared to 74% for men, highlighting persistent economic inequality.Only 12 countries have laws that provide equal rights to women and men in terms of property ownership, showcasing gaps in legal protections for gender equality. Overall, a long way to go.?

If you would like to know more about where your country currently stands with SDG 5 (and all other SDGs), you can check out the latest Sustainable Development Report - Country Profiles (as well as Rankings, Interactive Maps and a Data Explorer), and additional visual presentations available on Our World in Data.?

The sad fact remains that woman and girls are falling victim to physical and sexual violence. Women are less likely to be paid well for or even access higher-level jobs. Leadership positions in the public and private sector are dominated by males and women are more likely to spend more hours on unpaid work.?

The persistence of gender inequality is fundamentally a crisis of perception and education. Peace, fairness and equal rights and responsibilities for all of humanity will remain and ideas rather than a reality without effective education and societal transformation that does not discriminate against people on the basis of their gender and sexual orientation.?

How to achieve gender equality?

Like any other SDG, also SDG 5 would require a multifaceted and multi-dimensional approach. Some of the more higher level (and often global to national) aspects of achieving SDG 5 could probably include in summary (but not be limited to) something like the following:

• Empower Women and Girls: Invest in education and vocational training programs that equip women and girls with skills for economic independence and leadership roles.
• Promote Gender Equality in Leadership: Implement policies and quotas to increase women's representation in political and corporate leadership positions, ensuring diverse perspectives are included in decision-making.
• Address Gender-Based Violence: Strengthen legal frameworks and support services to prevent and respond to gender-based violence, including education and awareness campaigns to change societal attitudes.
• Ensure Equal Access to Resources: Facilitate equal access to health care, financial services, and land ownership for women, enabling them to make autonomous decisions about their lives.
• Engage Men and Boys: Promote programs that involve men and boys as allies in the fight for gender equality, encouraging them to challenge traditional gender roles and support women's rights in order to change mindsets, values and beliefs.?

By discriminating against women with regard to education, jobs and salaries they can access, we are biasing the labour market in ways that negatively affect local, regional and global economies. While a slow transformation is on its way in developed countries, many developing nations still show stark gender inequalities, despite widespread awareness that granting women access to education and jobs is one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty and population growth.?

Many thought-leaders of the environmental and sustainability movements have been and are women. To name a few: Rachel Carson, Donella Meadows, Petra Kelly, Elinor Ostrom, Jane Jacobs, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Vandava Shiva, Hazel Henderson, Janine Benyus, Ellen MacArthur, Christina Figueres and many more. It is reasonable to assume that increased gender equality across all sectors would lead to wiser decisions and leadership.?

Instead of putting too much emphasis on generic larger scale ‘solutions’, which are likely somewhat removed from the realities and contexts of many local communities wherever they are. And because the supported approach by Gaia Education for regenerative design and development, is about the context specific potential of each and every place and community. Hence, we want to support the life affirming or life regenerating local to bioregional conversations and co-creative processes which should be a starting point of whole systems based realisation of SDG 5 and all strongly linked and all other SDG systemically together. From this we provide some useful questions to ask yourself or a group you work with in relation to SDG 5 (sourced from the Gaia Education SDG Flashcards) in a multidimensional manner in the social, ecological, economic and worldview/cultural dimensions..?

As you already know this can? provide you with some ideas on how one can possibly work with the SDGs in different (not top down but bottom up) and generative approaches. Based and part of the Gaia Education SDG Flashcards, they contain more than 200 questions on the system-wide approach to achieving the 2030 Agenda.

The cards enable a participatory and problem-centric group conversation and solutions oriented multi-perspectival dialogue. They invite participants to engage and to collaborate to identify actions and solutions to implement the SDGs in ways that are relevant to their lives and communities, locally. This is an effective way to establish local and bioregional community ownership and realisation for the UN SDGs.

The SDG Flashcards are used in the SDG Training of Multipliers. Check out the freely downloadable SDG Training of Multipliers Handbook for a detailed description of how to prepare, promote, and how to use these cards? more easily to promote community activist training, in various settings (e.g. local public bodies, communities, schools, universities, business etc.) as well as many other tools from our SDG webpages.

There are of course many examples of working on SDG 5 and quality education in all its forms, sometimes also in a systemic way (Post 0).

Gaia Education is involved in educational and training offerings which support the implementation of the SDGs including SDG 5, but is part of projects and initiatives where at least one, mostly several SDGs are targeted. Examples of project involvement with some focus on SDG 5 in a wider sense are:?

????Youthful Herbal Chocolate, Sicily, Italy

The Youthful Herbal Chocolate Project aimed to build the capacity of young migrant women to begin a new life as they arrive in a region with the richest concentration of biodiversity in Europe, in terms of medicinal and aromatic herbs. The project combines the wild herbs of the Iblei territory with the traditional art of chocolate making in the city of Modica, with a view to creating opportunities for the young women to specialise in organic herbal chocolate making.

Led by Gaia Education in partnership with the migrant welcome centre, Passwork, and the social cooperative L’Arcolaio, this project intends to support the professional development of young female migrants and to indirectly support the emerging mosaic of regenerative medicinal and aromatic herbs, small-scale growers and the cooperative of chocolatiers of Modica.

????Empowering & Building Capacity in Tribal Communities in Odisha, India

Empowering and Building Capacity of Tribal Communities of Four Gram Panchayats of Laxmipur Block of Koraput District in Odisha to Increase Food Security, Strengthen Social Cohesion and Enhance Climate Resilience.

According to Odisha-based women’s federation, Orissa Nari Samaj (ONS),? it is the overworked tribal women and girls of the region, who carry out much of the agricultural labour and all of the domestic duties, who are the most vulnerable.

Suffering from high levels of food insecurity and poor nutritional intake, along with low levels of skill development, the communities of Koraput have also developed a great aspiration for transformation.

In response to their call, local NGO THREAD, Gaia Education and ONS, funded by the Scottish Government, came together to develop a project with 750 families of Koraput, to support the process of reversing these trends.

The project aimed to break the cycle of food insecurity by reintroducing agroecological farming techniques- with a particular emphasis on climate change-adapted farming. It then started to tackle the deeper structural issues causing local poverty, with community-designed activities to improve social linkages and the status of women.

How does your local community gender equality SDG project look like??

Again, let’s take our future into our own hands, and start your SDG journey and locally bioregionally based community project now!

And to close if you would like to learn much more about SDG 5? and all other SDGs and the Agenda 2030 and many more topics, approaches and methods to practically work with the SDG in your local and bioregional context we encourage you? to start or re-invigorate your personal SDG journey through the upcoming online SDGs Multipliers course, starting on 17th February 2025.

For more and the video affine the SDG 5 Gender Equality - UN Sustainable Development Goals - DEEP DIVE

?? Article written by Peter Gringinger.

Peter is a change agent and works with the use of whole systems, transition and regenerative design approaches, principles and methods, including permaculture, to provide support through integral and participatory facilitation for individuals, groups, neighborhoods, communities and organisations to co-create and co-design our sustainable futures of regenerative and thriving cultures, places, environments and local but globally networked livelihoods. Peter has a background and extensive experiences in earth systems, environmental and sustainability sciences and has been involved in many small to large projects in these fields of practice in a number of countries and regions around the world, with a recent focus on training, education and facilitation for regeneration. He is a Gaia Education certified trainer, a GEN Ambassador, Earth Charter Educator and Ecological Footprint Trainer and is or was actively involved with GEN Australia and Austria, Cohousing Australia and Transition Towns Austria.