“Empowering women and promoting gender equality is crucial to accelerating sustainable development. Ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but it also has a multiplier effect across all other development areas.”³²

“Ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health, and affording women equal rights to economic resources such as land and property, are vital targets to realizing this goal. There are now more women in public office than ever before, but encouraging more women leaders across all regions will help strengthen policies and legislation for greater gender equality.”³³

Women and girls are more empowered than ever before in human history, with greater access to education, economic opportunities and political power³⁰. Despite the successes in movement for greater equality, women and girls are still more likely to be affected by extreme poverty and struggle with getting access to paid employment in some regions. Barriers to ending discrimination against women and girls include “sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public decision making”³¹.

• Women and girls are more likely to live in poverty than their male counterparts.
• Globally, women earn 24% less than men. They are also more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, or excluded from the workforce than their male counterparts.
• In developing countries, a woman is 14 times more likely to die from childbirth than in the developed world.
• 800 women die each day from pregnancy or pregnancy-related complications which have been mostly eliminated in developed countries (2013)
• 12% of married or partnered women who wanted to avoid pregnancy did not have access to birth control and related health care services. (2015)²⁹