Breaking barriers for gender equality

The UN’s Pact of the Future, created following the latest sustainable development summit in New York, is a set of 56 pledges for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Pact commits to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, as doing so is ‘crucial’ to ‘progress across all the SDGs and targets.’ We share this commitment at Springer Nature. SDG 5: Gender Equality is one of ‘focus goals’: a subset of all 17 SDGs where we feel we have a more direct role to play.  

We know that the most significant contribution we at Springer Nature can make to achieving the SDGs is through the content we publish. We also sit at the heart of a network made up of researchers, policymakers, subject matter experts and more who, like us, see the goals as a framework for new research, partnerships and collaborations that can drive better outcomes for people and the planet. 

We often bring this network together with events or global initiatives. We either use our external profile as a leading publisher of SDG-related content to meet and collaborate with new partners, or our 18 individual SDG working groups design and deliver projects to advance the goals. Sometimes we combine both approaches, creating a powerful feedback loop and synchronising our internal and external SDG activity. The SDG 5 working group is one of the longest standing working groups at Springer Nature, with almost 70 colleagues from different departments and regions working on projects to advance gender equality.  

Sadly, gender equality is a significant way off. And this is particularly evident when you consider gender equality in the context of health (SDG 3: Good health and Wellbeing). As our published research and editorials show, there is a clear gender gap in health outcomes due to historic biases that continue to pervade current approaches to medical and health research, manifesting in a lack of funding for research on women’s health and the under-representation of women in health research, workforce and leadership.    

In September, we convened our network to discuss the intersection between SDG 3 and 5 with our second annual Nature Conference Breaking Barriers for Gender and Health Equity through Research in September. The event was a joint effort between our conferences team and the SDG 5 working group, with over 1600 participants joining from across the globe. If you missed it, you can watch the event on demand. 

The conference focused on the role of research in achieving equitable health outcomes for women and girls, but also on the importance of equity as a key requirement in maximising scientific progress and achieving the best health outcomes for all populations and in all parts of the world. Many of the panels and presentations took a very deliberate intersectional approach to the issue of health and gender equity, and issues such as the stalling effect of emergencies on forward progress for gender representation were covered too. 

The issue of one such emergency, conflict, also featured in a recent panel discussion organised by Springer Nature’s SDG 5 working group to mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, as part of our long running SDG Talks series. For us, interdisciplinary approaches to the SDGs means we can identify connections and make faster progress, so we were pleased to see these natural overlaps occur as they do in academic circles.  

These conversations illustrate the continued work and collaboration that the scientific community and broader stakeholders like industry leaders, policy and decision-makers must do to progress gender equity. Only by breaking disciplinary silos, building bridges and fostering collaboration, partnership, mentorship and championship of women for women can we hope to achieve the SDGs.