Gender Equality

This report provides policymakers with recommendations on how to build the resilience of women-led businesses in the long term. This includes policy actions to improve the competitiveness of women-led businesses, address the barriers they face when participating in trade, and make the policy environment more gender-responsive.

The climate crisis is the most pressing issue of our times, one that is threatening progress on gender equality and human rights and hindering the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Against this backdrop of rising global temperatures and unfulfilled national pledges, women, girls and gender-diverse people are mobilizing to demand that their voices be heard in decision-making on climate policy. To answer their demands, this paper describes how to achieve feminist climate justice through four interlinked dimensions (recognition, redistribution, representation and reparation) and the principles of interdependence and intersectionality. It provides practical guidance on what countries need to do to transition to low-emission economies that are resilient to a changing climate, while advancing gender equality and recognising the leadership of women, girls and gender-diverse people in driving the change that is so urgently needed. In doing so, it zooms in on the global food system as just one illustration of how this framework can be applied, as well as provides analysis of the major barriers to accountability for gender-responsive climate action and how they can be overcome. The vision for feminist climate justice is of a world in which everyone can enjoy the full range of human rights, free from discrimination, and flourish on a planet that is healthy and sustainable. With this conceptual framework, UN-Women aims to open up space for discussion of feminist alternatives to the status quo and to inform the next edition of its flagship report, Progress of the World’s Women, on gender equality in the age of climate crisis.

The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the most central and globally representative climate policy documents that outline the national climate plans of countries that have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement. Submitted every five years, the NDCs indicate the voluntary commitments of countries to achieving agreed-upon mitigation and adaptation goals. With climate impacts increasing in scale and intensity, communities on the frontlines are becoming more vulnerable, especially women and girls. As the year 2023 marks the conclusion of the first global stocktake of the Paris Agreement, this report reflects on how 119 NDCs incorporated SRHR issues and seeks to inform the next cycle of NDCs to be submitted in 2025. UNFPA, in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, conducted a systematic content analysis of SRHR references and related thematic areas in NDC documents for 119 countries. Accompanying this will be regional reports for five regions: Arab States, Asia Pacific, East and Southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and West and Central Africa. This global report examines the integration of sexual reproductive health and rights and related themes - including health, gender, population dynamics, youth, human rights, vulnerable groups and participation - in the NDCs of countries from 2020. It offers recommendations on how the next submissions can more effectively address these intersections in terms of impact, commitments, budget and other critical actions.

By revealing how under-prepared the world is for systemic shocks, COVID-19 has refocused attention on another, rapidly escalating crisis: that of environmental degradation and climate change. Only six years ago, the global community agreed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, recognizing the need for environmental, economic and social transformation to work in tandem to achieve human rights for all. Even before the pandemic, the world was off-track to meet these commitments. Now, with the world at a crossroads, one of the most consequential questions facing governments, business and the global community is whether decisive action will be taken to rapidly transition the global economy to more sustainable patterns of production and consumption to prevent—or at least reduce the extent of—environmental breakdown. There is growing recognition that marketbased solutions are ineffective in driving change at the requisite scale and pace. As the world looks to recover and rebuild after COVID-19, there is an opportunity to advance ‘gender-just’ transitions, a transformative approach that can achieve greater gender equality and set economies on more equitable and environmentally sustainable paths.

Under the framework of the UN Joint Global Programme on Essential Services, UN Women, together with UNODC and the IAWP, developed this handbook on gender-responsive police services to address the need for a strengthened justice sector response to violence against women and girls. The handbook is based on and complements existing global and country-specific handbooks and training materials for law enforcement. It covers areas such as prevention of violence against women and girls, gender-responsive police investigations, survivor-centred approaches, and institutional transformation within an often-complex justice system. It also provides guidance on responding to violence against women and girls during a crisis, including a pandemic.

Creating an enabling work environment across the United Nations (UN) system is essential to operationalize the organization’s founding principles of equality, justice and respect, and to ensure that no one is left behind, as promised in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. An enabling environment means a diverse, inclusive and respectful work environment – as a precursor to achieving gender parity and a key to sustaining it.

This discussion paper assesses the evidence base of the “men for gender equality” field in light of three aspects of its emergence as a field, namely: its un-interrogated use of the category of “men”, its recourse to social psychological accounts of gender norms, and the implications of its NGO form for its ability to collaborate with and be accountable to resurgent intersectional feminist mobilizations.