Excerpt from a First Take by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon at the Council on Foreign Relations:

Ten years after global leaders vowed to work toward eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education, reducing child mortality, and more, the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – particularly those relating to women – remain a distant hope. Though women were a focus of much discussion this week at the MDG summit in New York, the forward movement so far has been discouraging on the two MDGs directly relating to women: “promoting gender equality and empowering women” and “reducing by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio.”

An MDG report released in June noted that when it comes to women, “progress has been sluggish on all fronts – from education to access to political decision-making.”