Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

Executive summary
17
The task force
suggests 12
indicators for
countries and
international
organizations
to use in
monitoring
the progress
toward Goal 3
interventions to improve public infrastructure can contribute to reducing
violence against women.
Although international agencies and the global community have rallied
to address other epidemics (such as HIV and tuberculosis), they have not
responded in the same way to the epidemic of violence against women. For
instance, while the UN General Assembly resolution 50/166 established the
Trust Fund to End Violence against Women at the United Nations Development
Fund for Women, country needs and requests far outstrip the fund’s
current resources. The task force seeks to complement national, regional, and
global efforts by calling for a global campaign to end violence against women,
spearheaded by the UN secretary-general and endorsed by the General Assembly.
The goal of the global campaign would be to mobilize leadership at all
levels—local, national, and international—to generate action to make violence
against women unacceptable.
Data and indicators
The task force suggests several indicators for monitoring progress on the seven
strategic priorities at both the country and international levels. These indicators
are intended to supplement, or in some cases substitute for, the indicators
chosen by the UN expert group to assess progress during 1990–2015, when the
Millennium Development Targets are expected to be met.
Although the task force has not recommended the adoption of new international
or country-level targets for the seven strategic priorities, countries may
wish to set their own quantifiable, time-bound targets for establishing progress
on each of the seven strategic priorities. Examples of such targets to be achieved
by the year 2015 are, for strategic priority 2, “universal access to sexual and
reproductive health services through the primary health care system, ensuring
the same rate of progress or faster among the poor and other marginalized
groups,” and for strategic priority 6, “a 30 percent share of seats for women in
national parliaments.”
Millennium Development Goal 3 includes four indicators for tracking
progress:
• The ratio of girls to boys enrolled in primary and secondary education.
• The ratio of literate females to males among 15- to 24-year-olds.
• The share of women in wage employment in the nonagricultural sector.
• The proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments.
The indicators proposed for tracking Goal 3 are insufficient to track all seven
strategic priorities and suffer from several technical shortcomings. To address
these limitations, the task force suggests 12 indicators for countries and international
organizations to use in monitoring the progress toward Goal 3 (box 1).
None of these indicators measure the quality of equality, the process that
brings it about, or the nature of the outcomes. Achieving numerical balance—
parity—is clearly important in a world where even this goal has yet to be