Gender Disparities in Achieving SDG 5 (Gender Equality): A Comparative Analysis Using UN and World Bank Data

Abstract

The 5th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 5) involves gender equality and empowering all women and girls. In the present paper, the topic of reviewing the latest trends and cross-country differences in the movement to SDG 5 of the United Nations (UN) and World Bank data will be discussed and will be supplemented by the results of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Women, Business and the Law (WBL) program of the World Bank datasets. The progress is uneven across the world: the legal rights of women still do not have even the two-thirds of the legal rights of men including the safety and care of children; the proportion of women in parliament is still as much as only a quarter of the number of men; women labor participation in the workforce is still very diverse and differs between single-digit figures in some weak states and equality in some high income economies; childbirth death rates are already getting better but remain unreasonable and are not evenly distributed among all countries of the globe. We provide a regional and representative country-by-country comparison over indicators, comment on the factors which lead to it, and lay out those policy levers with the highest demonstrated effects (legal reform with enforcement, childcare systems, pay-transparency rules, and even violence-prevention frameworks). The paper ends with a research and policy agenda on how to make this kind of progress even faster in 2030.

Keywords: Gender Inequality, Cross Country Comparison, Labor-Force Participation, Legal Rights, Maternal Mortality, SDG 5, Women in Parliament, Women Economic Empowerment