The United Nations 2015 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for Gender Equality is one of the more recent examples of more than a century of global-level codification and commitment to the rights of women and equality of the sexes, variously described and defined. Goal 5 is just a small step in a journey of countering historical inequities based on physiological or social sex and sexuality that have generated discrimination, oppression and structural inequalities. This chapter will examine the recent and the long history of the issue of relations between the sexes, the concept of gender(s) and the position and status of women, men, and non-binary persons. This chapter will map out the interplay between feminist activism and the women's movement in relation to the unfolding actions of international affairs and moves toward global approaches to shared challenges around the world. Balancing the global or international, with the local and contextual, and the predominance of the Global North and post-enlightenment epistemologies constitute a contested area in studies of gender, a theme woven into the chapter and fleshed out in an example from Peru. That the SDGs are global, and assume certain categories of gendered personhood questioned by some scholars, is a problematic we discuss toward the end of this chapter in view of calls for decolonization of gender scholarship.

Somerville, Claire, and Maria Amalia Pesantes. A Long, Short, and Unfinished History of the Journey to Gender Equality. In Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion, edited by Martin Gutmann and Daniel Gorman, 160-175. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Maria Amalia Pesantes is a professor of Anthropology at Dickinson College.

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