A joint post by Dr Julieta Marotta & Abigail Daley “Because women have an incredible amount of power that should not be ignored when it comes to building a sustainable future.” International Women’s Day gives us a yearly moment to reflect on gender equality and remind ourselves of our progress and the progress we still need to make. The Master of Science programme in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP), with the support of UNU-MERIT, emphasises its commitment to gender equality by taki...

Two researchers from UNU-MERIT have won this year’s Best Paper Award from the Journal of Economic Psychology. The winning article, ‘Gender attitudes in the Arab region – The role of framing and priming effects’ was co-authored by among others Micheline Goedhuys and Eleonora Nillesen. Using survey data to study sensitive topics can lead to biased results. For example, direct survey questions on non-sensitive information, including ownership, already present the challenge of random and systematic ...

This series tracks news and views from our ‘Evidence-Based Policy Research Methods’ (EPRM) course. Many participants work at the highest of levels, both nationally and internationally, including for other sections of the UN system. In normal times, they come to the City of Maastricht in the Netherlands for this unique blended learning programme, covering a total of three weeks in class and 10 weeks online. … In this blog post, I discuss the gender gap in the LAC region and explain how digi...

In late 2020, the International Monetary Fund launched a Youth Fellowship Contest to give aspiring young leaders a chance to share their views on COVID-19 responses and global efforts to build back better – towards a greener, fairer and more inclusive recovery. Out of around 700 submissions from around the world, our EPRM alumna Krithiga Narayanan – a multi-platform journalist from India – was chosen to be one of 26 IMF fellows from 25 countries. She joined a range of bloggers, journalists, comm...

Thinking ahead to International Women’s Day on Monday I recalled two pivotal resolutions the United Nations General Assembly had adopted within a week of each other in 1972, one (27/2951) on December 11 establishing the United Nations University and the other (27/3010), on December 18, proclaiming 1975 as International Women’s Year. It is instructive to put those two resolutions in the chronological context of the Education Amendments of 1972 in the United States, enacted barely six months earli...

Women researchers have been at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, with female scientists across the globe playing pivotal roles, from advancing knowledge on the virus, to developing vaccines, treating patients and assessing the pandemic’s devastating economic and social impact. However, the health crisis has laid bare disparities in the scientific system. Girls are significantly under-represented in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects at school, and women occ...

A post by Riesa van Doorn, a student on our MSc. in Public Policy and Human Development … Today, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, let’s remind ourselves that violence against girls and women persists in every country in the world. According to the World Health Organization, gender-based violence affects one in three women in their lifetime. Before my Master’s programme in Public Policy and Human Development, the words ‘gender-based violence’ conjured ...

How many times have you rolled your eyes when someone said a country is progressive because half the parliament is made up of women? How much can this really tell us about gender equality and women’s participation in any particular country? Why does it even matter? As such a hot topic, I was excited to hear all about Catie Lott’s PhD dissertation, ‘Diamonds are a Woman’s Best Friend: Broadening Measures of Women’s Access to Formal Political Decision-Making’. Her doctorate looked at female policy...

As the world’s largest online and user-generated encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is an education medium used by students across the word. However, as with textbooks and educational materials in any society, Wikipedia suffers from great divisions and has the potential to shape our view of the world. For every four articles about men, just one article exists about a woman – and just 10% of content creators and editors on Wikipedia are women. Even more worrying is that the trend is declining: UNU-MERIT re...

Despite the fact that women comprise half the world’s population, gender inequality persists worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Beyond gender-based violence, this inequality manifests in various ways: from unequal control over resources, to unequal distribution of household duties, to legal or cultural constraints on women’s socio-economic mobility. So argue Dr. Micheline Goedhuys and Prof. Eleonora Nillesen in a new policy brief.  Achieving gender equality is important i...