Using the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), this paper explores the relationship between discriminatory social institutions and the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets by looking specifically at three MDGs: MDG 1, 2 and 5, and the missing dimensions of each of them. It finds that looking at women’s control over resources, their level of decision-making power in the family and household, and their degree of control over their own physical security can shed light on the bottlenecks that hamper further progress across all the MDG targets.