Gender Equality and the Work with Men and Boys

MenEngage recognizes that the Post-2015 Agenda must embrace a human rights-based approach, as championed by the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and believes that meaningful citizen participation should be built into every stage of the Post-2015 process, from developing the agenda, to the implementation, all the way through the monitoring and evaluation.

MenEngage stands with UN Women and women’s rights NGOs in advocating for a stand-alone goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights must be a cross-cutting issue in all other future development goals. To achieve gender equality it is essential to work with men and boys given that women’s and men’s lives are intertwined. Men have not only a responsibility to contribute to transforming oppressive gender systems, they will benefit from it as well.

Within the stand-alone gender equality and women’s empowerment goal, MenEngage strongly recommends to include the following three critical targets, accompanied by suggested indicators of work with men and boys:

1. Engage men and boys in preventing and responding to Gender Based Violence (GBV)
2. Commit men and boys to equal share in caregiving and household work
3. Engage men as supportive partners, clients and positive agents of change in sexual & reproductive health & rights and maternal, newborn & child health

These commitments build on the MenEngage Call to Action for the Post-2015 Agenda and on the MenCare+ oral statement delivered at the 58th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW58).