A Corpus-Based Study of Gender Omission in UN Sustainability Reports (2000–2024)

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-575-1_20How to use a DOI?

Keywords

gender omission; corpus linguistics; UN sustainability reports; critical discourse analysis; policy language; linguistic invisibility; sustainable development goals; lexical absence

Abstract

This study aimed to track the process by which gender disappears through insidious political silence in the language of United Nations sustainability documents released between 2000 and 2024. The search was conducted on a selected set of 123 official documents covering the Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, and major annual Environment and Development Reports. These were not considered neutral records but places where meaning was selectively constructed. The analysis of gender lexemes through corpus-assisted discourse analysis provided the mapping of the frequency, distribution, and semantic environment of women, gender, equity, and female. It was not just to enumerate how often they happened but to open their vanishing places. A paradox emerged. Although gender equality was placed as SDG 5, direct mentions of gender have decreased gradually since 2015. Where they did occur, they were in the rhetorical preambles. These parts were declarative, aspirational, and to a great extent, performative. However, they were still unambiguously missing in the core of the policy, such as climate adaptation strategies, energy transition strategies, and natural resource governance frameworks. Gender was rarely related to agency, authority in decision-making, or intersectional reality, even when invoked. Rather, it was a symbolic place value, deprived of political or material outcomes. The talk constituted an invisibility reproduction technique based on systematic lexical avoidance, high nominalisation rates, and passive constructions, which spread responsibility. These are not stylistic idiosyncrasies. These are structural characteristics with concrete implications. Such texts discard moral responsibility by eliminating gender as a machismo of implementation. They are also in the way of the same integration they claim to support. The results indicate a sense of necessity in the study. The policy drafting process must be linguistically aware. Silence is often as much a part of how sustainability is conceived as speech, and therefore, drafters must learn to identify it.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Vijayakumar Selvaraj
AU  - N. Sheik Hameed
AU  - N. Suguna
AU  - K. Thomas Alwa Edison
AU  - M. Vallikkannu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/06
TI  - A Corpus-Based Study of Gender Omission in UN Sustainability Reports (2000–2024)
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Dynamics of Environment, Sustainability, and Gender Disparities: A Holistic Dialogue for Inclusive Futures (ICDESGD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 322
EP  - 336
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-575-1_20
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-575-1_20
ID  - Selvaraj2026
ER  -