Gender Equality: What's the smartest SDG target?

Improving the lives of women, half the world’s population, is undoubtedly a worthy goal – but how do we best accomplish this? Women lag men in numerous social, political and economic indicators that it seems difficult to know where to start. However, in a new paper on gender equality, Professor Irma Clots-Figueras sheds light on this complex issue. 

What’s the smartest target to improve the lives of women?

As reported on Project Syndicate, ensure women have control over their bodies and reproductive decisions. This will likely generate benefits of $120 per dollar spent, because it will not only prevent deaths and illness during pregnancy and birth, but also increase investment in education of the next generation, leading to large productivity increases along with a sizable demographic dividend.
 
The next recommendations are to empower women economically and to ensure more female education. These targets benefit women $7, and $5 respectively, for every dollar spent.

Then there are two legal-political targets where the benefits are likely to be large, and the costs seem low, namely ensuring equal rights (property, contracts, business registration and banking) and increasing political representation of women.
 
However, the paper recommends we do NOT include absolute targets on ending violence and child marriage. Why? Because we don’t even know how to end violence, and to the extent we can, stopping the last one percent of violence will be phenomenally expensive. A more realistic target is to “reduce violence against girls and women” and “reduce child marriage”. Unfortunately, there is little economic evidence to suggest whether this will be a good or poor target. Thus, a focus on reproductive rights, education and empowering women economically will have much more certain benefits, a high benefit-cost ratio and indirectly help by both reducing violence and delaying marriage.

You can read all the papers on gender equality here and download the one page PDF here.