U.N. report calls for gender equality

? The world must confront widespread social and economic discrimination against women before it can hope to make a significant reduction in poverty, the United Nations said Wednesday.

“Gender apartheid” could scuttle the global body’s goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015, the U.N. Population Fund’s annual State of World Population report said.

“We cannot make poverty history until we stop violence against women and girls,” the fund’s executive director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, said at the report’s launch in London. “We cannot make poverty history until women enjoy their full social, cultural, economic and political rights.”

The report said gender equality and better reproductive health could save the lives of 2 million women and 30 million children over the next decade – and help lift millions around the world out of poverty.