Gender Inequality and the MDGs: What are the Missing Dimensions?

As world leaders meet in New York in September 2010 to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), there will be an opportunity to reorient and re-energise global efforts to meet these important targets. While there has been significant progress in some areas, ongoing gender inequality continues to hamper momentum on all the goals, not just MDG 3. Furthermore, there is growing recognition that MDG 3 is too narrow and fails to capture the full range of gender inequalities, and there has also been a failure to adequately recognise the gender dimensions in several of the other MDG targets.

Using the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), new research by the OECD Development Centre finds that looking at women's control over resources, their level of decision-making power in the family and household, and their degree of control over their own physical security can shed light on the bottlenecks that hamper further progress across all the MDG targets.

We find that countries where social institutions are highly discriminatory towards women tend to score poorly against the human development targets used to track progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Better understanding of how these discriminatory institutions relate to development outcomes could enhance aid effectiveness and inform development programming, as both donor and partner countries assess progress and remaining challenges in September 2010.

This issues paper explores the relationship between discriminatory social institutions and the MDG targets by looking specifically at three MDGs, focusing on the missing dimensions of each.