Sustainability through a gender lens: The extent to which research on UN Sustainable Development Goals includes sex and gender consideration

The approach described here offers a fresh perspective on both the UN SDGs and sex and gender consideration in SDG research by visualizing the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and then overlaying that view with the proportion of the publications associated with each term that also explicitly include sex and/or gender terms. We want to emphasize that this is not an end-point in of itself: as research evolves and the terms used by authors to describe their work in their publications evolve too, these keyword queries will need to be revised and updated, perhaps even extended or narrowed as policy and research priorities shift and change. What we have been able to show with great clarity is that consideration of sex and gender is uneven across the SDGs, and that even where overlap between the SDG and sex and gender research corpus is high, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG do not consider sex and/or gender. We therefore believe that there is progress to be made if we are to ensure that women and men benefit equally from achievements that stem from the UN SDGs. This study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and/or gender across research in every SDG, as well as an approach to evaluate change across each SDG over time. Fresh maps and tables can be created each year to monitor sex and/or gender integration progress as we move toward the 2030 SDG target goal