Building on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, billed by the UN as “An Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance.” The seventeen ambitious goals, which are intended to be reached by 2030, are conceived as integrated, indivisible, and as balancing the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. They are organized around five core pillars:

· People: ending poverty and hunger and ensuring that all human beings can lead fulfilling lives in a healthy and dignified environment.

· Planet: protecting the environment while ensuring sustainable use and management of natural resources.

· Prosperity: ensuring environmentally sustainable economic growth, mutual prosperity, and decent work for all.

· Peace: building societies that are peaceful, just, and inclusive, and in which human rights and gender equality are respected.

· Partnership: strengthening global solidarity to address inequalities within and between countries, by focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable.
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This Research Topic addresses the fifth Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Progress toward this goal is measured by a number of individual targets and indicators.
The reach of patriarchy was powerful and extensive. Agriculture and civilization have progressively deepened inequalities between men and women. Later, nation-states maintained the order that naturalized social hierarchies of subordination, marginalization and exclusion to populations that were historically relegated and that are not part of the white, heterosexual, middle-class male model. In this case, women, blacks, indigenous people, or those who do not adopt a heterosexual identity are kept on the sidelines in their own countries. However, patriarchal systems varied widely and were never universal. Thus, patriarchy can be defined as a method that objectifies to delegitimize, in addition to defining time and spaces to be occupied by women.
Patriarchal systems culturally emphasized women's frailty and inferiority. Women were responsible for all housework, and, in some cases, there were restrictions in place for them to attend public spaces. Marginalized women were more vulnerable to domestic violence and private houses often constituted a space of deprivation – of public life, of rights and of power.

In the 1960s, women's movements began to develop based on the construction of a collective female identity that gave them extraordinary importance in the combination of the relationship between the individual and the collective, between the public and the private. From then onwards, there is a greater concern with the challenge of injustice, inequality, and non-recognition. By constituting women as the target of policies and understanding their performance as having a differential in everyday relationships, the positions of women in situations of domination are made public. There have been many achievements in recent decades, however, it is still necessary for us to make progress in many instances. As highlighted in the UN’s most recent SDG progress report, equal participation in decision-making is still far from being achieved. Just over a quarter (25.6%) of women are in national parliaments, 36.3% in local governments and 28.2% in managerial positions. Violence against women still remains at unacceptable high levels: 1 in 3 women are victims of physical and/or sexual violence worldwide. Currently, 10 million girls are at risk of child marriage. And finally, the COVID-19 pandemic is increasing the burden of unpaid domestic and care work and pulling women out of the workforce. Women already spend about 2.5 times more hours than men on unpaid housework and care.
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According to the Sustainable Development Goals Report, the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have adversely affected progress towards gender equality. Violence against women and girls has intensified; child marriage, on the decline in recent years, is expected to increase; and women have suffered a disproportionate share of job losses and increased care work at home. The pandemic has highlighted the need to act swiftly to address pervasive global gender inequalities. Women have played a central role in the response to COVID-19, as frontline health workers, care providers, and as managers and leaders of recovery efforts. Yet they remain underrepresented in leadership positions, and their rights and priorities are often not explicitly addressed in response and recovery measures. The crisis presents an opportunity to re-shape and rebuild systems, laws, policies and institutions to advance gender equality. This Research Topic will address the fifth sustainable development goal from a sociology-specific perspective and will focus on issues such as the impacts, whether economic or social, of COVID-19 on progress towards gender equality, iolence against women and girls, child marriage, sexual violence including human trafficking, exploitation and sexual abuse, the labor market and care work, public/private relationship, as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies on gender.

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