Sustainability Through a Gender Lens: The Extent to Which Research on UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Includes Sex and Gender Consideration

Abstract

Through efforts of the international Gender Summits and UN Women, it is evident that all United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that the outcomes to achieve the SDGs benefit women and men equally. Our research, through the International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR), focuses on the extent to which sex and/or gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies that investigated gender research from a topical perspective using the Scopus database (Elsevier 2017), we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and/or gender terms. The approach described here offers a fresh perspective on both the UN SDGs and sex and gender in research by visualising the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and then overlaying that view with the proportion of the publications associated with sex and gender topics. We show that attention to sex and gender topics is uneven across the SDGs, and that even where overlap between an SDG and consideration of sex and gender is high, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG have little explicit connection with sex and gender. This study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and/or gender across all SDGs as well as monitoring integration progress over time.

Keywords: sex, gender, Sustainable Development Goals, Scopus, gender equality, UN Women, Gender Summits, SDG