The Road to Gender Equality: Global Trends and the Way Forward

International organizations have expressed widespread agreement that gender equality is an important social and economic goal. Well-being is a multidimensional measure of material status and encompasses income, health, education, empowerment, relative economic and social status, and security, although precise definitions and emphases on the individual components vary. Since the early 1980s, a number of international agencies have produced analyses of gendered trends in well-being. This paper compares and critically assesses the contribution of some of these studies to understanding the state of gender equality and the causal mechanisms that inhibit or promote such a goal.