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The Millennium Declaration commits itself to gender equality as part of its broader vision of human rights and social justice, The commitment is expressed in terms of two rationales: one intrinsic, seeing gender equality as a fundamental human right, the other instrumental, recognizing the powerful contribution that women make to the eradication of poverty in all its dimensions – and indeed to development itself. This paper takes as its starting premise the intrinsic case for gender equality, that it is a matter of human rights and social justice. Its primary aim is to analyse the pace of progress on gender-related goals, targets and indicators in different regions of the developing world, to explore the factors which have contributed to this progress as well as those which have blocked it. The paper homes in on those Millennium Development Goals and objectives that have the most direct gender dimensions to illustrate the nature of the constraints that block progress on gender equality and the kinds of interventions that can help to advance it. …

Jerker Edström argues that common interpretations of vulnerability in gender and development discourse, policy and practice tend to reinforce essentialisms about men and women. These interpretations compromise our ability to think clearly about the structural influences on HIV and sexual health, as well as its relations to gender inequity and women’s empowerment. He examines some predominant constructions of women in the AIDS response, based on the notion of vulnerability, and suggests how unhelpful the notion of vulnerability is to the political project of women’s empowerment in redressing inequality and injustice. …

This virtual IDS Bulletin on Challenging Patriarchy is presented in time for the Second Global Symposium on ‘Engaging Men and Boys for Gender Justice’, in Delhi November 2014, in order to contribute to ongoing political conversations, by highlighting significant articles from IDS Bulletins since the turn of the millennium. Much has happened since 2000, when Cornwall and White presented a first IDS Bulletin on Men, Masculinities and Development (2000), exploring how masculinities had been finding its way onto the lexicon and agendas of Gender and Development (GAD).  The queering of gender and its unsettling implications for our understandings of sexualities, pleasure and also masculinities in GAD, was forcefully presented in Cornwall and Jolly’s IDS Bulletin arguing that Sexuality Matters (2006).  More recently, a bulletin presented by Edström, Das and Dolan aimed at Undressing Patriarchy (2014) and connected perspectives from feminist, sexual rights and masculinities fields to explore the topic in a direction of intersectionality and deeper structures of constraint to gender equality. …