Tackling the challenges of tracking and determining progress for women relative to the commitments made in the Millennium Development Goals of 2000, this report outlines goals, targets, and indicators using comparative data; charts female literacy, enrollment in education, wage employment, seats in government, and infection with HIV/AIDS; and highlights innovations in measuring and monitoring gender equality around the world.
"A critical contribution to the success of the Millennium Development Goals. At the advocacy level, it demonstrates that gender is a crosscutting theme for all of the MDGs. At the technical and operational level, it contributes to a better global database ... and proposes new techniques to capture change in real life. And in broadening our knowledge base, it helps the entire development community to work together to achieve gender equality."—Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP
"This new report is a key contribution in the ongoing battle against absolute poverty.... UNIFEM's study will be an important tool in the great global challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals."—Jeffrey Sachs, UN Millennium Project
"None of the Millennium Goals will be achieved without decisive progress on the third goal: the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. For this reason, it is vitally important to monitor and track progress, to applaud countries that show results, and to demand action where it has faltered. Progress of the World's Women 2002 does that, and explores how our measures of progress can be expanded in meaningful ways.”"—Eveline Herfkens, UN Secretary-General's Executive Coordinator for the Millennium Development Campaign
"An important and timely contribution towards tracking the speed at which the world is moving forward on achieving the Millennium Development Goals. This report is a vital advocacy tool [and] also a valuable resource for the MDG Task Force on Education and Gender Equality, especially in terms of its proposals to expand the indicators and to enhance the measurement of women’s economic empowerment."—Winnie Byanyima, Member of Parliament, Uganda
"Essential for scholars, policymakers, and social activists. It reminds us again that women are disproportionately locked in poverty, requiring gender-specific policies that link poverty eradication with gender equality through women’s empowerment. And it provides inspiration by showing the variety of efforts throughout the world to promote gender equality made by women at all levels of civil society."—Sonia Monatño, UN Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean
