Yes, the World Really Can Eliminate Gender Inequality
Have you ever stood at the threshold of something new — a new job, home or relationship — and realized that everything from this point forward could be entirely different? Well, I believe we are experiencing that right now for gender equality.
For the very first time, governments across the world have agreed that in order to reduce global poverty we must empower women and girls and remove one of the biggest barriers to progress: gender inequality. Furthermore, they’ve agreed to do so by 2030.
By signing on to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015, governments committed to not only tackle the symptoms of gender inequality but also to drive a stake through the root causes. I call this the ‘tough stuff’ of development work: addressing the complex power dynamics and harmful social norms, including gender-based discrimination and violence, which have kept women and girls ‘in their place’ for far too long.
If the world is going to eliminate gender inequality, it’s going to happen now— or never. We now have before us the ideal confluence of momentum, interest and leadership, with a spotlight on the deep structural causes of inequality and exclusion as never before. The SDGs have positioned us to make real headway into the most complex challenges confronting women and girls’ lives. And it is important we take advantage of this global commitment.
We know that drawing attention to seemingly intractable problems can result in real progress. Over the past 15 years, we have seen gains for women and girls in some important, albeit limited, areas, showing what can be accomplished when governments and citizens lean in. For instance, there are more girls attending primary school than ever before; more countries around the world now have legal frameworks that address women and girls’ rights; and the rate of women dying in child birth has decreased by almost half since 1990. These are no small feats.
But this pace of change is far too slow for the hundreds of thousands of women still dying in childbirth every year; the 39,000 girls who are forced into early marriages, changing the entire trajectory of their lives; or the 1 in 3 women who experiences violence from an intimate partner.
Progress remains slow because the deeper context that underpins how women and girls are valued in society has remained firmly intact. Today, 20 years after the Beijing Platform for Action, women and girls still earn less, learn less, and have far fewer assets, and even less economic agency, than their male counterparts. They face unique constraints to accessing health services, owning a bank account or finding decent work. The work of gender equality remains unfinished and urgently necessary.
I believe the coming 15 years of the Sustainable Development Agenda will likely be our greatest opportunity to challenge, and change, the underlying drivers of inequality — to tackle both symptoms and the causes of inequality, exclusion and injustice in high-impact ways.
About a year-and-a-half ago, Melinda Gates wrote an article in Sciencearguing that women and girls matter in global development, and challenging the Gates Foundation to think and act more intentionally about putting women and girls at the center of what we do. She pushed us to get smarter, be more systematic, and prove that gender discrimination limits advances in human health and development outcomes for all — women, men, boys and girls.
This article was the impetus for a request for proposals through the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges program: calling for big, creative ideas to address women and girls’ empowerment that could be taken to scale; seeking innovative thinkers on gender equality programs; and looking for novel ways to measure impact. As Melinda Gates wrote, “it was time for the Gates Foundation to move from talking about women and girls to taking action to empower them.”
I joined the foundation as its director of gender equality just as we began reading the responses, and I was blown away: 1,742 Letters of Interest from 128 countries across the world — the most for a Grand Challenge to date. A rigorous review process yielded 19 finalists, totaling $24 million in funding, and a panoply of projects addressing the structural drivers of gender inequality.
The winners of the foundation’s first Grand Challenge on Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development (just announced today) gathered last month in Nairobi, Kenya to brainstorm about what it will take to move away from business-as-usual and make women and girls central to anti-poverty programs.
This group is a small part of a new era in tackling gender inequality. For the Gates Foundation, it is the early phase of a fresh strategy to empower women and girls, which I look forward to announcing shortly. Below are some of the opportunities we will explore in order to make genuine progress:
· Incentivizing men and boys to change social norms.
To quote a speaker from our Grand Challenges meeting in Kenya, Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, “If we want to put an end to the 15 million girls that enter into marriage at too young an age, we have to look also at the 15 million men that marry them, and another 15 million men or more that sanction those marriages.” Looking at the problem from a girl’s point of view is necessary, but not sufficient. Engaging with the boys and men around her — peers, partners, community leaders and service providers — is a critical part of the solution.
· Addressing institutions that shape women and girls’ access to information, services, and resources.
Empowerment comes not just from building the agency of women and girls, but through a deliberate ecosystem approach to key institutions — such as schools, business and industry, and legal systems — that influence women and girls’ lives.
· Recognizing that progress isn’t a linear proposition. Improving women and girls’ lives requires multiple, parallel efforts.
Success depends on understanding local contexts and meeting short-term imperatives while aiming for long-term change — all at the same time. Many of the gender transformative projects in the Grand Challenge aim to address women and girls’ daily needs, while at the same time advancing their overall social status (how women and girls are valued) in society.
· Power must be at the heart of the change we seek.
Power affects everyone’s lives, in every corner of the earth. But the experience of power and how it operates is different — and often worse — for women and girls. It is only by working on the complex interplay of social norms, power relations and discriminatory practices that we will see real advances in women and girls’ lives.
· Data and measurement must be central to what we do.
Otherwise, we won’t know what is working, and if not, why. In Nairobi, partners came together to build a collective learning agenda, and take a deep dive into joint approaches for measurement and evaluation of women and girls’ empowerment. We must document and analyze the pathways of social change together.
Those of us working on global gender equality have spent the last 20 years of advocacy to get women and girls at the table and on the agenda. Now, thanks to governments uniting behind the Sustainable Development Goals, we are eager to shift the focus to where it is desperately needed: on action and solutions. We have before us a new opportunity to address the transformation of gender relations, and the root causes of human inequality. It’s work that could transform the lives of women and girls everywhere.
Let’s seize the opportunity.
