Why Gender Indicators Matter in Achieving SDGs

Imagine trying to solve a puzzle when half the pieces are missing. That’s essentially what happens when we try to address global development challenges without proper gender indicators and disaggregated data. When we talk about building a more equitable and sustainable world, understanding where women and girls stand isn’t just helpful-it’s absolutely essential. Gender indicators serve as our roadmap, showing us not only where we are but also how far we still need to go in achieving true equality.

The role of gender indicators in development 🔗

Gender indicators are specialized measurements that help us track progress toward gender equality across different sectors and societies. Think of them as diagnostic tools that reveal the health of gender relations in any given context. These indicators go beyond simply counting women and men; they measure the quality of opportunities, access to resources, participation in decision-making, and the elimination of harmful practices that hold women back.

What makes gender indicators particularly powerful is their ability to make vulnerable groups counted and visible. Consider the example of Mongolia, where approximately 30% of the population lives a nomadic lifestyle. Without specific gender indicators focused on nomadic women herders, policymakers would have no way of understanding the unique environmental and economic challenges these women face. The National Statistics Office of Mongolia, supported by UN Women’s Women Count programme, developed targeted surveys that brought these women’s realities into clear focus for the first time.

Gender indicators serve three critical functions in development work. First, they inform policy formulation by providing evidence-based insights into what interventions are needed and where. When data shows that women in a particular region lack access to financial services or face barriers to land ownership, policymakers can design targeted programmes to address these specific gaps. Second, these indicators create accountability mechanisms. Governments and organizations that commit to gender equality can be held responsible for their promises when clear metrics are in place to measure progress. Third, indicators drive actual change by highlighting disparities that might otherwise remain invisible. Measurements can make visible the gaps between commitments, implementation and impact, pushing institutions to move from rhetoric to action.

How indicators translate into action 🔗

The practical impact of gender indicators becomes clear when we look at how they’ve shaped policy responses worldwide. When data revealed that women held only 28.2 per cent of management positions globally despite representing nearly 40 per cent of total employment, it sparked conversations about glass ceilings and the need for corporate diversity initiatives. The indicator showing that 55 per cent of countries lack laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination against women prompted legal reforms and advocacy campaigns. These numbers don’t just sit in reports-they fuel movements, shape legislation, and redirect resources toward addressing inequality.

Gender equality in sustainable development goals 🔗

The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by all UN member states in 2015, represent a shared blueprint for achieving peace and prosperity for people and the planet. Among the seventeen goals, SDG 5 stands out with its explicit focus on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. This goal isn’t standalone-it’s described as a cross-cutting objective that influences and enables progress across all other goals.

SDG 5 includes nine targets and fourteen indicators that address the full spectrum of gender inequality. These targets range from ending all forms of discrimination and violence against women to ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Target 5.1 focuses on ending discrimination everywhere, while Target 5.2 tackles the elimination of all forms of violence including trafficking and exploitation. Target 5.5 calls for women’s full and effective participation in political, economic, and public life, and Target 5.a seeks to ensure women’s equal rights to economic resources and property ownership.

The sobering reality of progress 🔗

While SDG 5 provides an ambitious framework, the data reveals how far we still have to go. At the current rate of progress, it will take up to 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments. These aren’t just numbers-they represent generations of women who will continue to face systemic barriers unless urgent action is taken.

The statistics paint a challenging picture. As of 2023, women held only 26.5 per cent of seats in national parliaments globally, just 4.2 percentage points higher than in 2015. Violence against women remains pervasive, with insufficient progress made in reducing intimate partner violence over the past two decades. Child marriage continues to affect one in five young women worldwide, and at the current pace, the world is at least 300 years away from ending this harmful practice. Furthermore, only 56 per cent of married women can make decisions about their own sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Beyond goal five 🔗

What makes gender indicators within the SDG framework particularly important is their intersectional nature. Gender inequality doesn’t exist in isolation-it compounds other forms of disadvantage. Women in STEM fields globally make up just 20% of science and engineering professionals, and this gap widens significantly for women who face additional barriers based on race or ethnicity. In the United States, Black and Hispanic women in STEM earn approximately $20,000 less per year than the average for STEM jobs and about $33,000 less than their white male counterparts. These layered inequalities require equally nuanced measurement and response.

Importance of data-driven change 🔗

There’s an old management saying that resonates perfectly with gender equality work: you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Gender-disaggregated data-information broken down by sex and other demographic characteristics-provides the foundation for understanding gender gaps and designing effective interventions. Without this data, development efforts operate blindly, potentially reinforcing rather than reducing existing inequalities.

Close to 80 percent of countries regularly produce sex-disaggregated statistics on mortality, labor force participation, and education. However, less than one-third disaggregate statistics on informal employment, entrepreneurship, or unpaid work, and even fewer collect data about violence against women. This gap in data availability means that critical aspects of women’s economic lives and safety remain poorly understood and inadequately addressed in policy.

The data we’re missing 🔗

As of June 2022, we have only 42% of the data needed for gender-specific SDG indicators. Fourteen gender-specific indicators have no data reported for any country, covering critical issues like sexual violence, poverty, and employment. This isn’t a small problem-it’s a massive blind spot that prevents effective action. How can countries develop programmes to address violence against women when they don’t have reliable data on its prevalence? How can financial inclusion initiatives succeed when data on women’s entrepreneurship and access to credit remains scarce?

The challenge isn’t just about collection-it’s also about disaggregation. Having valid and reliable disaggregated data that captures intersecting inequalities is more expensive and time-consuming to produce than aggregated data. Yet funding for gender data fell by more than 50% between 2019 and 2020, precisely when the COVID-19 pandemic was revealing how crises disproportionately affect women and marginalized groups. This funding shortfall means that specific groups of women continue to be left behind in development planning and implementation.

Real-world impact of better data 🔗

When countries invest in collecting and using gender-disaggregated data, the results are transformative. In Mexico, analysis revealed that women had lower non-performing loan rates than men, leading the National Banking and Securities Commission to reduce capital requirements for loans to women. This policy change, driven entirely by data, made credit more accessible to women entrepreneurs. Similarly, Uganda’s financial inclusion strategy now prioritizes women based on insights from gender-disaggregated data, demonstrating how evidence can directly shape more inclusive policies.

In Uganda, the adoption and revision of National Priority Gender Equality Indicators, with UN Women’s support, significantly improved the country’s ability to monitor SDGs. These indicators became key tools for annual SDG progress reports and national development plans. Between 2016 and 2020, gender data in Uganda’s voluntary national reviews increased by 150%, providing a much clearer picture of where the country stood on gender equality and what needed to change.

Balancing precision with practicality 🔗

The ideal scenario would involve comprehensive, highly disaggregated data for every indicator across all population groups. However, resource constraints and capacity limitations make this unrealistic in many contexts. The solution lies in strategic prioritization based on intended data use. Countries need to identify which gender indicators are most critical for their specific development priorities and invest in collecting high-quality data for those measures while working incrementally to expand coverage.

Some information, even if imperfect, is better than no information at all. UN Women’s Counted and Visible Toolkit provides guidance on deciding when and how to publish disaggregated gender statistics that may have limitations. The toolkit promotes transparency from data producers about the strengths and weaknesses of available data, empowering users to make informed decisions about what information can be reliably used for policy and planning purposes.

Looking ahead 🔗

The path to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 requires an urgent acceleration in data collection, analysis, and use. Gender indicators and disaggregated data aren’t luxuries or academic exercises-they’re fundamental requirements for effective development. As cascading global crises from climate change to economic instability continue to disproportionately affect women and girls, the need for timely, accurate gender data becomes even more critical. Without it, we risk designing interventions that miss their mark, allocating resources inefficiently, and leaving the most vulnerable women behind. With it, we can craft targeted policies, track meaningful progress, and hold ourselves accountable to the promise of leaving no one behind.

What do you think? How might better gender data collection transform development priorities in your community? What barriers do you see to collecting comprehensive gender-disaggregated data, and how might these be overcome?

References

1. https://data.unwomen.org/features/data-gender-seeing-true-picture
2. https://gsdrc.org/document-library/gender-and-indicators/
3. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/Goal-05
4. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5
5. https://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2016/05/09/more-and-better-gender-data-a-powerful-tool-for-improving-lives
6. https://www.findevgateway.org/finequity/blog/2024/03/why-does-gender-disaggregated-data-matter-for-reaching-financial-equality