Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions threatens everyone, but women and men will experience it differently. Discriminatory gender norms mean that women have fewer social and economic resources than men, which reduces their resiliency to natural disasters and other fallout from climate change. They are the primary managers of household resources, such as water and fuel, which may be in increasingly short supply. And many have livelihoods highly vulnerable to climatic variations, including in agriculture.
'Gender equality is not a women’s issue; it concerns men and boys as well as women and girls. Garnering sufficient support for the profound social changes required by the gender equality agenda cannot be achieved by women alone. It also requires the active involvement of men, all the more so as they often control the resources needed for this work.
Complex problems can sometimes be solved with simple solutions. For maternal and child health, significant progress has been achieved in Viet Nam by providing weekly supplements of iron and folic acid, and in the Philippines by encouraging breastfeeding. In the process, both countries have taken a step closer to achieving Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4, which calls for a two thirds reduction in under-5 mortality between 1990 and 2015, and MDG 5, which calls for a three quarters reduction in the maternal mortality ratio.
KHANH HOA — Viet Nam has achieved the best performance in Southeast Asia in eradicating the gender gap over the past 20 years, said Minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan at a seminar in the central province of Khanh Hoa on Saturday.
Vietnam ranks 113th out of 182 countries and territories in terms of its Human Development Index (HDI), according to the UNDP’s 2009 Human Development Report.
In American schools, boys are underachieving and girls are excelling. This gender gap in academic achievement is evident as early as kindergarten. The longer students are in school, the wider the gap becomes.
