As the United Nations have committed to mainstream gender in all their major documents, the Sustainable Development Goals are entailed to enclose a double approach to gender: a traditional stand-alone goal to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls (SDG5); and gender mainstreaming as a necessary strategy to achieve not only gender equality, but also the overall 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Because gender mainstreaming commitments tend to get diluted in the design phase itself, the goal of this thesis is to verify that gender has been mainstreamed effectively along the targets and indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals. To do so, I proposed a framework for the appropriate mainstreaming of gender based on the recommendations of various United Nations bodies and the work of several scholars. Such framework was applied to the case studies of three goals that represent a different degree of gender mainstreaming: SDG4 (gender-sensitive), SDG8 (gender-sparse) and SDG7 (gender-blind). The analysis revealed that most of the targets and indicators lack a comprehensive approach to gender; therefore gender was not mainstreamed equally, effectively nor adequately. As a consequence, most of the potential benefits of mainstreaming gender for the overall achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development will be missed.
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