“Despite significant progress in meeting international development goals for women’s empowerment, gaps in key areas remain, which require a renewed effort from all partners to better integrate gender issues into the overall quest for sustainable development, a United Nations gender equality official said today,” the U.N. News Centre reports. On Wednesday, Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (U.N. Women) “opened a high-level forum at U.N. Headquarters in New York” that is “looking at challenges and achievements in meeting the targets for women’s and girls’ progress in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” the news service notes. Though there has been “significant progress” in some areas, “[t]here were also stark gaps within and between countries, she said,” according to the news service. “In regard to the development framework beyond 2015, [Puri] called for a new, stand-alone goal with three core concerns: ending violence against women; equal access to resources and opportunities; and equal participation in all sectors of society,” the U.N. News Centre writes (12/4).