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Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment

Food security and nutrition

Improving access to adequate, safe, and nutritious food for women and girls, and ensuring their specific nutritional needs are met throughout their life course.​

Focus area one covers three distinct areas separately, as follows: 

Unequal access and distribution of nutritious and healthy foods. Globally, women and girls are more food insecure and malnourished than men due to unequal access and discriminatory social norms. Women often eat less and lower-quality food, prioritizing others' needs at their own expense. Women and girls’ specific nutritional needs throughout their life course. Girls’ and women’s nutritional needs are different than men’s and vary across their life stages. Poverty and discriminatory gender norms affect women’s nutrition, exposing them to additional health risks later in life (for example during pregnancy).  

Pregnancy, breastfeeding, and hard physical labour increase women’s need for nutritious food. A woman’s nutritional status directly affects her pregnancy and child’s growth and health. 

Empowerment of all women and girls for improved food security and nutrition for all. Women’s and girls’ empowerment improves household nutrition and overall wellbeing. It also benefits maternal and child health. 

Despite women’s roles in food-related tasks, key decisions – including those related to food - are often controlled by men. Women should have full autonomy over their nutrition and influence on household food choices.  

Traditional nutrition education tends to reinforce rigid gender roles by focusing only on women in their role of caregivers. Different results can be achieved by also engaging men and boys.  

Key figures 

  • The gender gap in moderate or severe food insecurity narrowed at the global level from 2021 to 2023. 

  • However, it increased slightly in 2024, with the prevalence of food insecurity remaining consistently higher among women than among men, globally and in all regions.  

  • The global prevalence of anaemia in women aged 15 to 49 years increased from 27.6 to 30.7 percent from 2012 to 2023. There was either no improvement or an increase in prevalence in nearly all regions (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2025). 

  • Globally, about one-third of children aged 6 to 23 months and two-thirds of women aged 15 to 49 years achieved minimum dietary diversity (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2025). 

  • Design policies and programmes addressing women’s unique needs across life stages, with priority to pregnant and lactating women.  

  • Use multi-stakeholder collaboration and gender-responsive approaches to develop policies that tackle malnutrition. 

  • Adapt nutrition programmes to national contexts, addressing health needs, culture and dietary customs.

  • Promote nutrition education that is inclusive and culturally appropriate for women and men. 

  • Support gender-responsive research, knowledge creation and extension and advisory services (EAS) to help women access and produce nutritious food.  

Resources