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Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

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  • Rachel Herbert
  • Holly J Falk-Krzesinski
  • Kristy James
  • Andrew Plume

Abstract

Through efforts of the 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 benefit women and men equally. Our research focuses on the extent to which sex and gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies, we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and gender terms. The approach visualizes the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and overlays 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 gender across all SDGs as well as monitoring integration progress over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel Herbert & Holly J Falk-Krzesinski & Kristy James & Andrew Plume, 2022. "Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(10), pages 1-15, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0275657
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275657
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Scott E. Carrell & Marianne E. Page & James E. West, 2010. "Sex and Science: How Professor Gender Perpetuates the Gender Gap," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(3), pages 1101-1144.
    2. United Nations UN, 2015. "Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," Working Papers id:7559, eSocialSciences.
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