Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

How can the global community achieve the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women? This question is the focus of Goal 3 of the Millennium Development Goals endorsed by world leaders at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 and of this report prepared by the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality. The report argues that there are many practical steps that can reduce inequalities based on gender inequalities that constrain the potential to reduce poverty and achieve high levels of well-being in societies around the world. There are also many positive actions that can be taken to empower women. Without leadership and political will however the world will fall short of taking these practical steps--and meeting the goal. Because gender inequality is deeply rooted in entrenched attitudes societal institutions and market forces political commitment at the highest international and national levels is essential to institute the policies that can trigger social change and to allocate the resources necessary to achieve gender equality and womens empowerment. Many decades of organizing and advocacy by womens organizations and networks across the world have resulted in global recognition of the contributions that women make to economic development and of the costs to societies of persistent inequalities between women and men. The success of those efforts is evident in the promises countries have made over the past two decades through international forums. The inclusion of gender equality and womens empowerment as the third Millennium Development Goal is a reminder that many of those promises have not been kept while simultaneously offering yet another international policy opportunity to implement them. (excerpt)