UN Women’s work on women’s economic empowerment has a broad and ambitious mandate and aims to strengthen women’s economic rights and respond to pressing global needs. This independent corporate thematic evaluation was undertaken to assess the relevance, effectiveness, coherence, efficiency, and sustainability of UN Women’s contributions to women’s economic empowerment by advancing gender responsive laws, frameworks, policies, and partnerships, and proposes recommendations and insights to strengthen this area of work.

Pursuant to General Assembly resolution 74/235 on women in development, in the present report, the Secretary-General considers global evidence and trends and reviews and assesses measures taken at the national level, since 2019, regarding gender-responsive poverty eradication, social protection, and labour market policies; women’s labour and human rights and ending gender-based discrimination; women’s entrepreneurship; women’s and girls’ unpaid care and domestic work and women’s paid care work; gender-based violence and sexual harassment; universal access to healthcare services, including sexual and reproductive health; and the right to education throughout the life cycle, taking into account the impacts of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in these areas.

This policy paper explores the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination faced by racially marginalized women, rooted in systemic racism, sexism, and other systems of inequality. It offers recommendations to States, international actors, and civil society organizations on ways to implement urgent reforms to improve access to services and human rights protections for women who are marginalized based upon their race, gender, and migration status.

UN Women partnered with the Inter-Parliamentary Union to prepare a handbook on gender-responsive law-making. This handbook aims to serve as a resource for lawmakers from around the world for designing gender-responsive laws. Such law-making should address the strategic needs of women and girls and must encompass enacting new laws and amending or repealing laws which are outdated, inconsistent with constitutions, or discriminate against them.

This policy brief provides a critical assessment of the “men for gender equality” field, and proposes new directions for programming and policy on men and boys. This includes moving away from a focus on individual men’s identities, attitudes and behaviours, and towards a greater focus on the structures and systems that sustain gender inequalities.

This edition of the “UN Women impact stories” series includes stories of UN Women’s selected programmes to end violence against women and girls across the world, highlighting the impact of our work and the partnerships that make it possible.

This report examines the roles of women in fisheries and aquaculture in countries of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and the challenges and opportunities for their economic empowerment. The report provides a set of recommendations for policymakers and other stakeholders to further advance gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in this sector.

This implementation package is a suite of practical resources and tools to support the implementation of the RESPECT Women: Preventing Violence against Women Framework. The package is built upon the global evidence base, expert recommendations and practitioner consensus to support policy makers and practitioners in developing ethical and effective VAW prevention programming.

This study serves as an evidence-based instrument that demonstrates how leveraging attitudinal change can be used as a critical tactic towards advancing gender equality. The findings have the potential to inform policymakers, advertisers, private sector leaders, civil society, and decision-makers on challenging discriminatory attitudes and gender roles that perpetuate gender inequality and women’s subordinate status in society.

This brief provides background information on the root causes and risk factors that explain why violence against women occurs in the first place. It highlights how the context of COVID-19 is exacerbating those factors and the impact it is having on rates of violence against women and the ability to undertake evidence-based prevention work in the current context. It provides indicative interventions that can be undertaken during social distancing.

This publication focuses on training as preventive intervention. It discusses current thinking on what makes training effective and presents a new framework for standards. Transformative work involves building a values-based approach to sexual harassment and an audit/culture check to establish the shape of harassment therein, with training that links these two. Training must fit the specific context, be conducted by experts in gender inequality, and be conducted face to face.

This discussion paper on cultural change needed to end sexual harassment offers inputs on training, victim-focused work, rational reporting and collective ownership. It recognizes the work of the global women’s movements that put the issue in the spotlight, the women who led the international clamour for recognition of their voices and accountability for all perpetrators.

This manual provides step-by-step guidance to Parties to United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on integrating gender issues and promoting gender equality in the design of transformative land degradation neutrality (LDN) projects. It builds on work launched by UN Women, the UNCCD, and the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in advising governments on transformative efforts to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation through gender- and socially equitable means.

In this report, the Secretary-General underscores measures taken at the national level to incorporate a gender perspective into national sustainable development policies and strategies; promote sustainable, inclusive and equitable economic growth strategies that benefit women and active labour market policies on full and productive employment and decent work for women; eliminate gender-based occupational segregation and gender wage gaps; accelerate the transition of women from informal to formal employment; prevent and eliminate all forms of violence, discrimination and sexual harassment against women at work; and promote the reconciliation of work and family responsibilities.

This report provides reviews of the activities undertaken by Member States and United Nations entities to enable women and girls, especially the poorest and most marginalized, in rural areas to improve their livelihoods, well-being and resilience in a changing climate.

This discussion paper identifies some of the most prevalent custody and child maintenance regimes in cases of divorce, dissolution of a civil union, and separation of parents, and examines them with an emphasis on their impact on women’s rights and gender equality.

UN Women, in partnership with Unilever, developed this guide to support the implementation of the “Global Women’s Safety Framework in Rural Spaces” (GWSF). The guide aims to provide support to producers on how to practically implement three main areas of the GWSF, including promising practices, case studies, and tools.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the agricultural sector remains critical to local and regional economies. Based on original research in five countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and United Republic of Tanzania), this policy brief shows that gender gaps in agricultural productivity do not arise because women are less efficient farmers but because they experience inequitable access to agricultural inputs, including family labour, high-yield crops, pesticides, and fertilizer.

This handbook, produced by UN Women and the ILO, provides practical guidance and examples of how to address violence and harassment against women in various work settings. The handbook includes: background on the issues, relevant international and regional policy and legal frameworks, the role of state and non-state actors, social dialogue, situations in which women are more exposed, how to respond, and entry points for prevention.

Globally, more than 2.5 billion women and girls are affected by discriminatory laws and the lack of legal protections. This policy strategy seeks to fast track the repeal of discriminatory laws in 100 countries between 2019 and 2023, focusing on six thematic areas, and will address the legal needs of more than 50 million women and girls.