SDG5 Gender Equality

SDG 5: Gender equality Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

  • SDG1

Empowering women and girls to reach their full potential requires that they have equal opportunities to those of men and boys. This means eliminating all forms of discrimination and violence against them, including violence by intimate partners, sexual violence and harmful practices, such as child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM).
Despite much progress toward gender equality half of women are economically active, compared with over three-quarters of men.

Empowering women’s economic opportunities

Legal frameworks that protect men and women equally are an important first step toward gender equality, but discriminatory laws persist. Around 60 percent of countries lack legislation that ensures equal opportunities in hiring practices, requires equal remuneration for work of equal value, or allows women to perform the same jobs as men. While almost all countries mandate maternity leave, almost half do not guarantee mothers an equivalent position on their return, discriminating against women who become pregnant and want to come back to work after the birth of a child (figure 5a).

Women in developing countries spend four times as many hours on unpaid work as men

In every region, women and girls do the bulk of unpaid work, including caregiving and household tasks such as cooking and cleaning. Women report that on average they spend 19 per cent of their time each day on unpaid labour versus 8 per cent for men. The responsibilities of unpaid care and domestic work, combined with paid labour, mean that women and girls work longer hours than men and boys and have less time for rest, self-care, learning and other activities.

Source: and World Bank_World View Report_2016