This month all the world looks to Afghanistan as the Taliban rises up to once again to govern the country, filling the power void left by the retreat of the last of the US presence there. As much of the Western media—both traditional outlets and more informal online forums—worries over the fate of Afghani women, this is an excellent time to take stock of the fact that women still represent a vulnerable population in many of the world’s societies and their status everywhere stands to be improved.

Improving the status and well-being of women is the objective of the 5th Sustainable Development Goal —achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. This Goal is an important human rights initiative for women, but it is also, says the United Nations, a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. 

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals is that they are interlinked: it is impossible to make progress toward any of them in a vacuum. The relationship between the individual-social, environmental and economic goal areas mirrors the complex interrelationship between these spheres of human life.

According to the UN special report which details the interlinkages among the 17 Goals, “providing women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large." This is assertion is supported by a recent comprehensive study which found that societies which do not respect the rights of women fair worse in overall terms.

Conversely, the interrelation between gender equality and the other SDGs is demonstrated by the negative effects that backsliding in terms of other development objectives has on SDG 5 in particular. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in the fallout from the ongoing pandemic.

As has been well-documented, women everywhere have suffered disproportionately from the compounded effects of Covid-19. Among the most prominent examples of gender inequalities exacerbated during the pandemic are the rise in unpaid care and domestic work (which is overwhelmingly allotted to women in societies all over the world) as children spend long periods home from school and other family members may require at-home medical care. The compounded economic impacts of the pandemic are also felt disproportionately by women, who already generally earn less than men in more precarious job positions. Finally, there is the alarming rise in gender-based violence directed at women as the stress of the other effects of the pandemic exacerbates already difficult domestic situations.  While unfortunately no society seems to be immune to this phenomenon, the toll has been worse on women in societies troubled by economic and environmental woes.

Some of the reasons for this correlation are intuitive, for example that fact that women in wealthier societies are more likely to find gainful employment outside the home and be able to afford child-care. Other factors are related in a more nuanced and indirect way. For example, women in developing countries are more severely negatively impacted by climate change, as they tend to be responsible for securing water, food, and fuel for cooking and heating—an endeavor which natural disasters and extreme weather events increasingly disrupt.

The reality is that women are still a vulnerable population throughout the world, and vulnerable populations suffer disproportionately when societies are troubled by environmental and economic woes.

While Goal 5 explicitly sets out directives to improve the status of women and girls everywhere, there is still somewhat of a grey area regarding another vulnerable population:  LGBTQ+ women and those who don’t identify with one of the two predominantly recognized genders (non-binary individuals). Given that these individuals belong to a doubly marginalized minority, they are especially vulnerable to the social, economic and environmental hardships that the Goals were put in place to combat. In a paper on the Sustainable Development Goals and LGBT inclusion, Stonewall—a UK-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group— states that while they “believe the Sustainable Development Goals are an extremely positive step in the right direction” and that the inclusive intention of the Goals is clear, they nonetheless  “could have gone further, by explicitly calling for LGBT equality”. A position paper published by the OECD insists that the inclusive language of the goals (for example the fact that the Agenda calls to “leave no-one behind”) means that protection for LGBTQ+ individuals implied, and stresses the fact that Goal 5 calls for an end to all discrimination and violence against women and girls “which includes lesbophobia, biphobia and transphobia.” Still, in the context of the same report they acknowledge that “gender-based violence is often driven by a desire to punish people who don’t conform to gender norms and, as a result, male and non-binary people who move away from these norms are also targeted.”

While it is undoubtedly necessary to put initiatives in place to protect women specifically (and while these initiatives can help advance the rights of other marginalized groups), it is vital that NGOs and aid organizations working to help women don’t interpret the language of Goal 5 too narrowly to include only cisgender women. 

Professor Ingrid Salvatore—a political philosopher at Luiss who teaches Gender Studies in the Department of Political Science—points out that the discussion how we should understand the gender component of SDG 5 tracks a broader discussion on gender and how we might conceptualize it. In this context, we should ask whether gender should be understood as “a self-attributed identity essential to promoting our good” or “a social construction from which we should try to free ourselves”. Further, if we are to expand our notion of gender beyond traditional categories then “what is there after the collapse of sexual binarism?” and how should feminists respond to this collapse? Finally, “what are the relationships between our multiple identities of class, race, sex?”.

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Do you think that the language of SDG 5 should be expanded to explicitly mention non-binary individuals, or that there should be a goal specifically mentioning the LGBTQ+ community?

If you are interested in political, social and economic issues related to gender, check out Emiliana De Blasio’s class Gender Politics and Ingrid Salvatore’s course on Gender Studies (in Italian) in Luiss’ Department of Political Science.