importance of gender awareness essay

Gender Matters

• Exploring gender and gender identity

However, it often appears that gender in its truest sense is absent from our social relations, because the way in which most people perceive gender tends to be internalised so deeply that it appears ‘normal’ and natural .

Understanding how we live together means being able to question the things we take for granted in our everyday lives. This includes a key part of our identity: our gender.

This website is a resource for working with others , but it is also a resource that underlines the need constantly to work with oneself . It could even be said that one is not really possible without the other .

In some ways, the reasoning behind this can be expressed easily: each of us is a person with our own subjectivity and experience of living with others in society – so everyone is personally involved in discussions of gender . It is easy to test this out: most people have had experiences where someone’s appearance does not immediately signal ‘male’ or ‘female’.

Perhaps fewer people then go on to ask themselves what this indicates about gender, or about how they perceive gender stereotypes. In fact, on a daily basis, it is common for people to organise their perceptions according to gendered assumptions that have never been questioned.  

The concept of ‘gender awareness’ reminds us that we all need to be aware of issues such as the following:

• We are likely to see ourselves within such categories as male/female or man/woman, but these categories do not in fact do justice to the complexity of gender and sexual identities ;
• We consciously and unconsciously express our gendered selves in numerous ways, including in our relations with others;
• We interpret and evaluate other people’s gender and this affects the ways that we interact with them ;
• We use images, associations, assumptions and normative standards to interpret the gender(s) and sexualities of others, and are often unaware of the way this happens or how these influences originate;
• Gender is of key importance in defining the power, privilege and possibilities that some people have and some people do not have in a given society. It affects progress towards equality and freedom from discrimination.

Gender awareness is necessary as an end goal for everyone, but deliberate work on this issue is particularly important for youth workers and young people who want to address issues of gender and violence with their peers. Gender awareness is necessary because no one is ever completely able to ‘step outside’ of the social and cultural processes that partly shape our identities , values and perceptions , but we can still develop ways of reflecting and ways of interrogating ourselves, and this is very important for group work and group interaction. Gender awareness should also be seen as a process , because our ways of thinking about ourselves and others as gendered, sexual beings shift over time and in different contexts.

Sex and gender

Facilitating discussion

Gender mainstreaming

• What is gender-based violence?
• What causes gender-based violence?
• Types of gender-based violence
• Gender-based violence and human rights
• Youth work and youth policy responses

Chapter 1: Gender identity, gender-based violence and human rights

Gender Matters, a manual on addressing gender-based violence affecting young people

Gender awareness-raising

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Awareness raising is a process which helps to facilitate the exchange of ideas, improve mutual understanding and develop competencies and skills necessary for societal change.

What is gender awareness raising?

Gender awareness raising aims at increasing general sensitivity, understanding and knowledge about gender (in)equality.

Awareness raising is a process which helps to facilitate the exchange of ideas, improve mutual understanding and develop competencies and skills necessary for societal change [1]. Gender awareness raising means providing reliable and accessible information to build a better understanding of gender equality as a core value of democratic societies. As a gender-mainstreaming method, gender awareness raising is crucial for integrating a gender perspective into policies, programmes, projects and services that respond to the different needs of women and men.

Definition and purpose

Gender awareness raising aims to promote and encourage a general understanding of gender-related challenges, for instance, violence against women and the gender pay gap. It also aims to show how values and norms influence our reality, reinforce stereotypes and support the structures that produce inequalities [2].

Gender awareness raising plays an important role in informing women and men about gender equality, the benefits of a more gender-equal society and the consequences of gender inequality. For example, raising awareness about the proven economic benefits of advancing gender equality, such as the strong, positive impact on gross domestic product (GDP) and higher levels of employment [3], and about the profound negative impact of gender inequalities, for instance, the fact that women are at a higher risk of poverty because of lower employment prospects [4].

Gender awareness raising intends to change attitudes, behaviours and beliefs that reinforce inequalities between women and men. It is therefore crucial to develop awareness-raising methods that generate a favourable space for debate, promote political interest and encourage mobilisation [5]. In this way, they contribute to gaining broad support and political will for implementing gender mainstreaming and gender equality policies.

Gender awareness raising goes hand in hand with gender equality training as a way to transmit the necessary information and knowledge to take action. This is especially true for the actors involved in policy processes, as it enables them to create interventions that address women’s and men’s priorities and needs [6] (Read more on EIGE’s Gender Equality Training toolkit ).

The purpose of gender awareness raising is threefold:

• to provide basic facts, evidence and arguments on various topics relating to gender equality to increase awareness and knowledge about gender (in)equality;
• to foster communication and information exchange so as to improve mutual understanding and learning about gender (in)equality;
• to mobilise communities and society as  a  whole to bring about the necessary changes in attitudes, behaviours and beliefs about gender equality.

Providing information and raising awareness about gender equality does not, however, automatically lead to social change [9]. Gender awareness-raising initiatives may be met with obstacles and resistance that need to be carefully considered and overcome.

When dealing with resistance, it must be borne in mind that resistance is part of any change process. Resistance can be used to promote change, and there are ways of dealing with it. Sometimes signs of resistance are not necessarily a reaction to the specific topic of gender equality or gender mainstreaming but they can be a reaction to change in general.

In order to overcome resistance, it is important to deal with it by inviting actors to an open dialogue and giving them an opportunity to articulate their concerns and objections. In such a dialogue, it is vital to focus on a common goal as well as on the benefits for everyone. Highlighting facts and figures and using scientific studies to back up arguments can also help to prevent the use of unsubstantiated arguments in debates.

EIGE’s toolkit on institutional transformation provides comprehensive resources, strategies and examples of how to deal with resistance to gender equality at individual, organisational and discursive levels.

How does gender awareness raising work?     

Gender awareness raising can be a part of internal awareness-raising processes in an organisation or institution and/ or it can be a part of planned external activities directed to the general public or a targeted group.

As a gender-mainstreaming method, raising awareness of gender equality can be considered to be a specific activity to be implemented within policies, programmes or projects. To be effective, the process of awareness raising must identify and meet the needs and interests of the actors involved [10]. This can be achieved by paying attention to the following key issues [11].

Who is the target group?

Before starting any gender awareness-raising initiatives, the socio-demographic characteristics (e.g. sex, age, ethnicity, level of education and any other relevant characteristics) of the target group should be considered in order to develop tailored awareness-raising initiatives. In addition, opinion leaders can also be selected as a sub-segment of the target audience because, as influential members of a group, they can promote societal change.

What is the content of the message?

The message communicated and the content of awareness-raising activities should be designed and framed around the specific gender equality topics under consideration. The way the message is conveyed and framed can influence how it is perceived and the overall effect it has. Framing factors include the choice of words and imagery, using emotions or facts and rational arguments, and presenting the consequences of (in)action as losses or gains. Importantly, the content of the message should be credible. It should communicate information that is accurate and is perceived as accurate, based on data with an acknowledgement of the source.

Gender inequalities are the result of a complex web of socially constructed roles and norms that are culturally and historically entrenched in societies. Attitudes towards gender equality, the roles of women and men and gender stereotypes involve feelings, beliefs and behaviours that are formed, nurtured and perpetuated by society, family, institutions, education and religion, among other factors. These attitudes are strongly influenced by social norms that form the basis of the perception of what is right or wrong and the way men and women relate to each other at home and in society [7].

Positive changes in attitudes towards gender equality require multidimensional and interlinked interventions. Hence, gender awareness-raising initiatives should be as targeted and as tailored as possible. As an illustration, raising awareness of the different forms of violence against women and how unequal gender relations perpetuate gender-based violence is an important element for prevention [8]. To see examples of successful, specifically targeted and tailored campaigns aimed at raising awareness to end violence against women, visit the European Women’s Lobby website .

Which gender awareness-raising measures should be used?

The type of awareness-raising measures selected will depend on the context and the identified aims in terms of policy, programme or project. An integrated communication programme, which combines different channels, is advisable to reinforce the message. This may include [12]:

• communication initiatives that aim to widely disseminate key messages, involving large-scale media such as television, newspapers, radio and websites;
• public events (e.g. concerts, information booths at festivals, etc.) to convey the message to a specific target group, such as young people;
• social media and social networks, which offer the possibility of interactivity and the potential for the viral dissemination of the message online;
• community-based initiatives in a local context to mobilise communities, empower women and promote community dialogue on gender equality, for example, through: public meetings, presentations, workshops, informal social events using interpersonal and participatory approaches;
• static and travelling exhibitions and displays;
• printed materials — for example brochures, billboards, cartoons, comics, pamphlets, posters, resource books and audio-visual resources;
• political advocacy and lobbying.

EIGE’s collection of good practices includes an example of an integrated communication programme which aimed to challenge traditional stereotypes, reduce the care gap and promote men’s active role in the family.

It is also important to develop specific initiatives targeting men and boys in recognition of the need to understand their role in achieving gender equality and to involve them in gender-equality efforts.

An example of a gender awareness-raising initiative targeting men and boys is the White Ribbon Campaign — a global movement of men and boys formed in 1991 working to end male violence against women and girls. Active in over 60 countries, the campaign aims to raise awareness about the prevalence of male violence against women and promote new values on masculinity and relationships between men and women [13].

Another example of awareness-raising measures specifically addressing men is a national awareness-raising campaign launched in Poland in 2012, Etat Tata. Lubię to! (Full-time dad — I like it!) . The main theme was to encourage fatherhood and active fathering through a campaign aimed at encouraging men to participate in childcare. The campaign was evaluated by researchers at the University of Warsaw and showed some changes in attitudes among respondents with regard to fathers’ and mothers’ roles in childcare and child raising, and the division of housework and childcare between parents.

The importance of using gender-sensitive language

Language plays an important role in how women’s and men’s positions in society are perceived and interpreted, which in turn influences the attitudes towards women and men. Certain words or use of the masculine form as the generic one (common in most languages) can overshadow women in the law, contribute to stereotypes (for instance, in professions), and make women’s roles and needs invisible, among other things. In this way, language contributes to, produces and reproduces sexist and biased thoughts, attitudes and behaviours [14].

While gender-neutral language is not gender-specific and makes no reference to women and men, gender-sensitive language is gender equality made manifest through language. In practice, using gender-sensitive language means:

• avoiding exclusionary terms and nouns  that  appear to refer only to men, for instance, ‘chairman’, ‘mankind’, ‘businessman’, etc.;
• avoiding gender-specific pronouns to refer to people who may be either female or male (use ‘he/she’, ‘him/ her’ or ‘they/them’ instead of ‘he/his’) [15];
• avoiding stereotypes, gendered adjectives, patronising and sexist terms and expressions (for instance, referring to women as ‘bossy’, or ‘the weaker sex’) and references to women’s marital status and titles.

In line with these guidelines, in 2009 the European Parliament adopted a series of recommendations on gender-neutral language to be used in parliamentary documents, which are intended to reflect two particular features of the European Parliament’s work: its multilingual working environment and its role as a European Union legislator [16].

With the aim of fostering a common understanding of gender equality terms across the EU and promoting gender-fair and inclusive language to improve equality between women and men, EIGE has developed a Gender Equality Glossary and Thesaurus , a specialised terminology tool focusing on the area of gender equality.

In 2019, EIGE will also release a toolkit on gender-sensitive language.

Pictures, graphics, video and audio materials are also powerful communication tools to influence perceptions, attitudes and social change. The principles of gender-sensitive language for written and oral communications must also be applied to audio and visual materials, i.e. videos, photographs and infographics [17].

These are key principles for gender-sensitive communication [18]:

• Ensuring that women and men are represented. Both women and men should be visible and treated equally in media products and messages. It is important to ensure that the voices of both women and men are included in press releases, news stories, broadcasts and other communications that are used by the media to inform the public and raise awareness. When preparing communication materials it is important to plan how women’s and men’s voices can be captured and ensure that women are also visually presented as equals in all areas of life.
• Challenging gender stereotypes. Gender-sensitive communications can contribute to challenging gender stereotypes through language and images. It is important to avoid using words and expressions that reinforce gender stereotypes as well as images that portray them and/or exert violence. It is important to choose images that portray a balanced representation of both genders and to ensure that they do not discriminate against or demean a person.

Further information

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Sayers, R., Principles of awareness-raising for information literacy, a case study , Unesco, Bangkok, 2006.

Council of Europe, Gender mainstreaming — Conceptual framework, methodology and presentation of good practices — Final report of activities of the Group of Specialists on Mainstreaming(EG-S-MS) , Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law, Strasbourg, 2004.

European Institute for Gender Equality, Economic benefits of gender equality in the EU , 2017.

European Institute for Gender Equality, Poverty, gender and intersecting inequalities in the EU — Review of the implementation of area A: women and poverty of the Beijing Platform for Action , Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2016.

World Bank, Executive education program for professional parliamentary staff, Unit 8: Changing attitudes for gender equality.

Council of Europe, Raising awareness of violence against women: Article 13 of the Istanbul convention — A collection of papers on the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence , 2014.

Tufte, T. and Mefalopulos, P., Participatory communication — A practical guide, Working Paper No 170 , The World Bank, Washington DC, 2009.

Ibid. and Sayers, R., Principles of awareness-raising for information literacy, a case study , Unesco, Bangkok, 2006.

White Ribbon Campaign website .

Menegatti, M. and Rubini, M., ‘ Gender bias and sexism in language ’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication.

European Commission, Interinstitutional style guide, Section  10.6  ‘Gender-neutral language’.

European Parliament, Gender-neutral language in the European Parliament , 2009.

United Nations Development Programme, Principles of gender-sensitive communication , UNDP Gender Equality Seal Initiative, n.d.

European Institute for Gender Equality, Institutional transformation — Gender mainstreaming toolkit .

Haider, H., Changing attitudes and behaviours in relation to gender equality, GSDRC Publications, 2012.

Sibbons, M., ‘ Approaches to gender-awareness raising: experiences in a government education project in Nepal ’, Gender and Development, Vol. 6, No 2 (Education and Training), July 1998, pp. 35-43.

Unesco, Gender sensitivity —  A training manual , 2002.

United Nations, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Gender stereotypes and stereotyping and women’s rights , 2014.

Image copyright: GlynnisJones/Shutterstock.com

5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

Gender equality – which becomes reality when all genders are treated fairly and allowed equal opportunities –  is a complicated human rights issue for every country in the world. Recent statistics are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 108 years to achieve gender parity . The biggest gaps are found in political empowerment and economics. Also, there are currently just six countries that give women and men equal legal work rights. Generally, women are only given ¾ of the rights given to men. To learn more about how gender equality is measured, how it affects both women and men, and what can be done, here are five essays making a fair point.

Take a free course on Gender Equality offered by top universities!

“Countries With Less Gender Equity Have More Women In STEM — Huh?” – Adam Mastroianni and Dakota McCoy

This essay from two Harvard PhD candidates (Mastroianni in psychology and McCoy in biology) takes a closer look at a recent study that showed that in countries with lower gender equity, more women are in STEM. The study’s researchers suggested that this is because women are actually especially interested in STEM fields, and because they are given more choice in Western countries, they go with different careers. Mastroianni and McCoy disagree.

They argue the research actually shows that cultural attitudes and discrimination are impacting women’s interests, and that bias and discrimination is present even in countries with better gender equality. The problem may lie in the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks factors like wage disparity and government representation. To learn why there’s more women in STEM from countries with less gender equality, a more nuanced and complex approach is needed.

“Men’s health is better, too, in countries with more gender equality” – Liz Plank

When it comes to discussions about gender equality, it isn’t uncommon for someone in the room to say, “What about the men?” Achieving gender equality has been difficult because of the underlying belief that giving women more rights and freedom somehow takes rights away from men. The reality, however, is that gender equality is good for everyone. In Liz Plank’s essay, which is an adaption from her book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, she explores how in Iceland, the #1 ranked country for gender equality, men live longer. Plank lays out the research for why this is, revealing that men who hold “traditional” ideas about masculinity are more likely to die by suicide and suffer worse health. Anxiety about being the only financial provider plays a big role in this, so in countries where women are allowed education and equal earning power, men don’t shoulder the burden alone.

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist with Vox, where she works as a senior producer and political correspondent. In 2015, Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30” in the Media category. She’s focused on feminist issues throughout her career.

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

Some of the most visible examples of gender inequality and discrimination comes from “Me Too” stories. Women are coming forward in huge numbers relating how they’ve been harassed and abused by men who have power over them. Most of the time, established systems protect these men from accountability. In this article from Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker staff writer, we get a look at what’s happening in China.

The essay opens with a story from a PhD student inspired by the United States’ Me Too movement to open up about her experience with an academic adviser. Her story led to more accusations against the adviser, and he was eventually dismissed. This is a rare victory, because as Fan says, China employs a more rigid system of patriarchy and hierarchy. There aren’t clear definitions or laws surrounding sexual harassment. Activists are charting unfamiliar territory, which this essay explores.

“Men built this system. No wonder gender equality remains as far off as ever.” – Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Freelance journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan (whose book The New Normal is scheduled for a May 2020 release) is discouraged that gender equality is so many years away. She argues that it’s because the global system of power at its core is broken.  Even when women are in power, which is proportionally rare on a global scale, they deal with a system built by the patriarchy. O’Hagan’s essay lays out ideas for how to fix what’s fundamentally flawed, so gender equality can become a reality.

Ideas include investing in welfare; reducing gender-based violence (which is mostly men committing violence against women); and strengthening trade unions and improving work conditions. With a system that’s not designed to put women down, the world can finally achieve gender equality.

“Invisibility of Race in Gender Pay Gap Discussions” – Bonnie Chu

The gender pay gap has been a pressing issue for many years in the United States, but most discussions miss the factor of race. In this concise essay, Senior Contributor Bonnie Chu examines the reality, writing that within the gender pay gap, there’s other gaps when it comes to black, Native American, and Latina women. Asian-American women, on the other hand, are paid 85 cents for every dollar. This data is extremely important and should be present in discussions about the gender pay gap. It reminds us that when it comes to gender equality, there’s other factors at play, like racism.

Bonnie Chu is a gender equality advocate and a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. She’s the founder and CEO of Lensational, which empowers women through photography, and the Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Gender Sensitivity and Its Relation to Gender Equality

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• Juana Figueroa Vélez 6 &
• Susana Vélez Ochoa 6  

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals ((ENUNSDG))

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Gender awareness ; Gender sensitization

Gender sensitivity encompasses the ability (skills, knowledge, and attitudes) to acknowledge and make existing gender differences, issues, and inequalities visible (UNIFEM 2007 ). This capacity is reflected through an awareness applied to everyday life situations, policies, projects, institutions, and a variety of contexts. It includes an understanding of how gender roles have been socially constructed, and how those social constructions often presuppose the existence of inequalities or unfair distribution of opportunities (UNIFEM 2007 ). Gender sensitivity incorporates a cross-cultural analysis to raise awareness of obstacles for gender equality and focuses on how inequalities take place on the grounds of gender. It can also be read as a part within an awareness spectrum, ranging from gender negative to gender transformative (Christodoulou 2005 ; Zobnina 2009 ). Within this spectrum, gender sensitivity lies in the middle, between...

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Figueroa Vélez, J., Vélez Ochoa, S. (2021). Gender Sensitivity and Its Relation to Gender Equality. In: Leal Filho, W., Marisa Azul, A., Brandli, L., Lange Salvia, A., Wall, T. (eds) Gender Equality. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95687-9_46

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Gender Equality: Why it Matters, Especially in a Time of Crisis

Bossoutrot Sylvie, Country Manager, World Bank Armenia

We have achieved much in recent history on the path to gender equality, but we have a long way to go to ensure equal endowments, participation, and voice for women.

The stakes are even higher now that the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is ravaging the world, as times of great crisis often put women on the front lines. Women predominate in key roles as nurses, social workers, and caregivers.  They are also working as doctors and volunteers, and as political and community leaders making critical decisions about how to address the public health, social, and economic effects of the crisis.  Women’s participation will be vital to our success against this shared global threat.

Let us first acknowledge the progress made so far…

Today, we tend to take it for granted that women can vote. But - with the exception of a few frontrunners like New Zealand, Australia, and Finland - universal suffrage became a reality only after World War I. Eventually, voting rights for women were introduced into international law in 1948 by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Women have also taken advantage of increased opportunities to serve as leaders. In 2019, women held nearly 1 in 4 legislative seats worldwide  - more than double their share in 1995. Management positions are also more likely to be held by women now than twenty years ago, though parity is still a long way off.

With greater representation comes improved outcomes. Looking at education, the world has seen enormous progress in reducing gaps between girls and boys across a variety of important areas such as enrollment rates and literacy outcomes.

In health, fewer mothers are dying in childbirth and significant increases in female life expectancy have followed. With few exceptions, women now outlive men in virtually every country.

In terms of labor participation, more women in countries at every level of income have been engaging in economic activities beyond non-market work in the home.

Around the world, many national reforms have been enacted in recent years to improve the status of women in the workplace, in marriage, and especially to protect women from violence.

Yet, there is still a long way to go…

Despite this meaningful progress, important gender gaps remain. These vary in scale from country to country and take different forms - from physical violence and deprivations to unequal opportunities in work or political life.

The World Health Organization estimates that over 1 in 3 women worldwide will experience violence in their lifetime.

Sadly, the risk of being subjected to violence increases in times of distress, such as the outbreak of COVID-19. The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Dubravka Simonovic, warned that it was “very likely that rates of widespread domestic violence will increase, as already suggested by initial police and hotline reports.”

Gender disparities also take shape in unequal opportunities to participate fully in economic life. UN Women found that women are less likely than men to participate in the labor market and more likely to be unemployed.

Women are paid less, earning 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work (performing 76 percent of total hours of unpaid care work worldwide). In fact, if women’s unpaid work were assigned a monetary value, one study of six countries has suggested that it would constitute between 10 and 39 percent of GDP . 

These opportunity gaps suggest that women could be disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Women make up a larger share of health and social care workers around the world: 70 percent in 104 countries . Also, early analysis from the World Bank indicates that those in caregiving roles may face an increased burden in the wake of school closures, with working mothers finding themselves even more stretched than usual in trying to juggle home-based work, home-schooling, childcare, and housework.

Inequality of access is also a key concern. Globally, nearly 40 percent of women in wage employment are estimated to lack access to social protection .

Women are less likely than men to have access to financial institutions or to have a bank account. Although women-owned enterprises represent more than 30 percent of registered businesses worldwide, only 10 percent of women entrepreneurs have the capital they need to grow their businesses.

These gender gaps impose real costs on society…

As the World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and the Law 2020 points out, “equality of opportunity is good economics.” Indeed, it is estimated that women’s lagging participation in employment and entrepreneurship cost the world about 15 percent of its GDP .

In considering a “full potential” scenario in which women participated in the economy identically to men, McKinsey concluded that this would add $28 trillion (26 percent) to annual global GDP by 2025 as compared to business as usual.

Yet when girls are allowed to dream and realize their potential, we are all better off…

To quote the famous early 20 th century Armenian novelist and activist, Zabel Yesayan, “a woman is not born into this world to be pleasing. A woman is born to develop her mental, moral and physical abilities.”

Over the course of history, many women have embarked on a path of self-realization to the benefit of our society. Some are famous, some less so, but each contributed to advancing the world, whether by promoting human rights and peace, forging ahead in science, or serving on the front lines to save human lives and protect public health.

Let us pay tribute to just a few.

Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize (twice!) - in physics in 1903 for her work on radioactivity, and again in chemistry in 1911 for her study of the elements polonium and radium.

The first Chinese female Nobel laureate, Tu Youyou, received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for her discoveries in advancing treatment for malaria, which have since saved millions of lives.

Katherine Hannan, responding to the Red Cross’s call for nurses, volunteered just as the United States entered WWI and the Spanish flu began to ravage the army and eventually the world. She quickly rose through the ranks to head nurse and superintendent, overseeing 100 nurses.

Mother Teresa was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her tireless humanitarian work on behalf of the poor and ailing in Calcutta.

And, today, women are helping lead the battle against COVID-19: on March 7, the Chinese authorities recognized 20 female medical workers for their outstanding and heroic role in the country's fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

Carolina Elliott, a local woman from Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States, is organizing food deliveries to help doctors and nurses get “through grueling 12-hour shifts.” “Because when you’re busy in the hospital like that,” she says, “you don’t have time to think about food.”

Shobha Luxmi is one of the doctors leading the fight against COVID-19 in Pakistan. She heads an isolation ward for coronavirus patients at a Karachi hospital, which receives 500 patients a day. “I have almost been working round the clock. I just get a few hours of sleep, and even then I am thinking about the hospital,” she recounts .

And we also look up to the many anonymous and silent female heroes around the world who are caring for the growing number of sick people and helping the vulnerable who have been affected by the current pandemic.

Despite the added burdens, crises present an opportunity to improve gender equality…

Unfortunately, we are likely to see some setbacks in gender equality during the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. The European Institute of Gender Equality has stated that the closure or near-closure of businesses could have a severe effect on women-dominated professions (such as flight attendants, hairdressers, and tour operators), and unpaid care work will continue to increase.

In highlighting the gendered impact of COVID-19, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has stated that, “Targeted measures to address the disproportionate impact of the crisis on women and girls are needed.”

The COVID-19 crisis has put unprecedented pressure on governments, development organizations, and communities. While we strive urgently to respond, we should not lose sight of our goal to achieve gender equality. Instead, we should make it part of our overall effort to tackle these unprecedented challenges and come out stronger afterward.

With contributions from Armine Grigoryan (Consultant, World Bank, Armenia) and Amanda Green (Consultant, World Bank).

Gender Equality Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on gender equality essay.

Equality or non-discrimination is that state where every individual gets equal opportunities and rights. Every individual of the society yearns for equal status, opportunity, and rights. However, it is a general observation that there exists lots of discrimination between humans. Discrimination exists because of cultural differences, geographical differences, and gender. Inequality based on gender is a concern that is prevalent in the entire world.  Even in the 21 st century, across globe men and women do not enjoy equal privileges. Gender equality means providing equal opportunities to both men and women in political, economic, education and health aspects.

Importance of Gender Equality

A nation can progress and attain higher development growth only when both men and women are entitled to equal opportunities. Women in the society are often cornered and are refrained from getting equal rights as men to health, education, decision-making and economic independence in terms of wages.

The social structure that prevails since long in such a way that girls do not get equal opportunities as men. Women generally are the caregivers in the family. Because of this, women are mostly involved in household activities. There is lesser participation of women in higher education, decision-making roles, and leadership roles. This gender disparity is a hindrance in the growth rate of a country. When women participate in the workforce increases the economic growth rate of the country increases. Gender equality increases the overall wellbeing of the nation along with economic prosperity .

How is Gender Equality Measured?

Gender equality is an important factor in determining a country’s overall growth. There are several indexes to measure gender equality.

Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) –   GDI is a gender centric measure of Human Development Index. GDI considers parameters like life expectancy, education, and incomes in assessing the gender equality of a country.

Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) – This measure includes much detail aspects like the proportion of seats than women candidates hold in national parliament, percentage of women at economic decision-making role, the income share of female employees.

Gender Equity Index (GEI) – GEI ranks countries on three parameters of gender inequality, those are education, economic participation, and empowerment. However, GEI ignores the health parameter.

Global Gender Gap Index – The World Economic Forum introduced the Global Gender Gap Index in 2006. This index focuses more on identifying the level of female disadvantage. The four important areas that the index considers are economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, health, and survival rate.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Gender Inequality in India

As per the World Economic Forum’s gender gap ranking, India stands at rank 108 out of 149 countries. This rank is a major concern as it highlights the immense gap in opportunities in women with comparison to men. In Indian society from a long time back, the social structure has been such that the women are neglected in many areas like education, health, decision-making areas, financial independence, etc.

Another major reason, which contributes to the discriminatory behavior towards women in India, is the dowry system in marriage.  Because of this dowry system, most Indian families consider girls as a burden.  Preference for son still prevails. Girls have refrained from higher education. Women are not entitled to equal job opportunities and wages. In the 21 st century, women are still preferred gender in home managing activities. Many women quit their job and opt-out from leadership roles because of family commitments. However, such actions are very uncommon among men.

For overall wellbeing and growth of a nation, scoring high on gender equality is the most crucial aspect. Countries with less disparity in gender equality have progressed a lot. The government of India has also started taking steps to ensure gender equality. Several laws and policies are prepared to encourage girls. “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana ” (Save girl, and make girls educated) campaign is created to spread awareness of the importance of girl child.  Several laws to protect girls are also there. However, we need more awareness of spreading knowledge of women rights . In addition, the government should take initiatives to check the correct and proper implementation of policies.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

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Understanding Gender, Sex, and Gender Identity

It's more important than ever to use this terminology correctly..

Posted February 27, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

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Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene hung a sign outside her Capitol office door that said “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust the Science!’” There are many reasons to question hanging such a sign, but given that Rep. Taylor Greene invoked science in making her assertion, I thought it might be helpful to clarify by citing some actual science. Put simply, from a scientific standpoint, Rep. Taylor Greene’s statement is patently wrong. It perpetuates a common error by conflating gender with sex . Allow me to explain how psychologists scientifically operationalize these terms.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA, 2012), sex is rooted in biology. A person’s sex is determined using observable biological criteria such as sex chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia (APA, 2012). Most people are classified as being either biologically male or female, although the term intersex is reserved for those with atypical combinations of biological features (APA, 2012).

Gender is related to but distinctly different from sex; it is rooted in culture, not biology. The APA (2012) defines gender as “the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex” (p. 11). Gender conformity occurs when people abide by culturally-derived gender roles (APA, 2012). Resisting gender roles (i.e., gender nonconformity ) can have significant social consequences—pro and con, depending on circumstances.

Gender identity refers to how one understands and experiences one’s own gender. It involves a person’s psychological sense of being male, female, or neither (APA, 2012). Those who identify as transgender feel that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex or the gender they were assigned at birth; in some cases they don’t feel they fit into into either the male or female gender categories (APA, 2012; Moleiro & Pinto, 2015). How people live out their gender identities in everyday life (in terms of how they dress, behave, and express themselves) constitutes their gender expression (APA, 2012; Drescher, 2014).

“Male” and “female” are the most common gender identities in Western culture; they form a dualistic way of thinking about gender that often informs the identity options that people feel are available to them (Prentice & Carranza, 2002). Anyone, regardless of biological sex, can closely adhere to culturally-constructed notions of “maleness” or “femaleness” by dressing, talking, and taking interest in activities stereotypically associated with traditional male or female gender identities. However, many people think “outside the box” when it comes to gender, constructing identities for themselves that move beyond the male-female binary. For examples, explore lists of famous “gender benders” from Oxygen , Vogue , More , and The Cut (not to mention Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head , whose evolving gender identities made headlines this week).

Whether society approves of these identities or not, the science on whether there are more than two genders is clear; there are as many possible gender identities as there are people psychologically forming identities. Rep. Taylor Greene’s insistence that there are just two genders merely reflects Western culture’s longstanding tradition of only recognizing “male” and “female” gender identities as “normal.” However, if we are to “trust the science” (as Rep. Taylor Greene’s recommends), then the first thing we need to do is stop mixing up biological sex and gender identity. The former may be constrained by biology, but the latter is only constrained by our imaginations.

American Psychological Association. (2012). Guidelines for psychological practice with lesbian, gay, and bisexual clients. American Psychologist , 67 (1), 10-42. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024659

Drescher, J. (2014). Treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients. In R. E. Hales, S. C. Yudofsky, & L. W. Roberts (Eds.), The American Psychiatric Publishing textbook of psychiatry (6th ed., pp. 1293-1318). American Psychiatric Publishing.

Moleiro, C., & Pinto, N. (2015). Sexual orientation and gender identity: Review of concepts, controversies and their relation to psychopathology classification systems. Frontiers in Psychology , 6 .

Prentice, D. A., & Carranza, E. (2002). What women should be, shouldn't be, are allowed to be, and don't have to be: The contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. Psychology of Women Quarterly , 26 (4), 269-281. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-6402.t01-1-00066

Jonathan D. Raskin, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology and counselor education at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

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Governance, social development, conflict and humanitarian knowledge services

Understanding gender

Page contents:

Introduction

What is gender and why does it matter, gender relations and status in the household, intersection of gender and other forms of discrimination, masculinities, gender analysis and mainstreaming, further resources.

Gender is an important consideration in development. It is a way of looking at how social norms and power structures impact on the lives and opportunities available to different groups of men and women. Globally, more women than men live in poverty. Women are also less likely than men to receive basic education and to be appointed to a political position nationally and internationally. Understanding that men and women, boys and girls experience poverty differently and face different barriers in accessing services, economic resources and political opportunities helps to target interventions.

Before undertaking a gender analysis, it is important to understand the concept of ‘gender’. According to the World Development Report (WDR) 2012, gender is defined as socially constructed norms and ideologies which determine the behaviour and actions of men and women. Understanding these gender relations and the power dynamics behind them is a prerequisite for understanding individuals’ access to and distribution of resources, the ability to make decisions and the way women and men, boys and girls are affected by political processes and social development.

Compared with men, women control fewer political and economic resources, including land, employment and traditional positions of authority. Acknowledging and incorporating these gender inequalities into programmes and analyses is therefore extremely important, both from a human rights perspective and to maximise impact and socioeconomic development. The WDR 2012 highlights the importance of directly targeting the persistent constraints and obstacles to women’s equality (especially in areas of economic empowerment, educational gaps, household/societal voice, and violence against women) in order to enhance productivity and improve longer-term development outcomes. Gender equality is also important for sustainable peace, and there is a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that a higher level of gender inequality is associated with higher risks of internal conflict.

World Bank. (2012). ‘Overview’ in World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, World Bank, Washington DC This report examines how greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and make institutions more representative. Markets, institutions, and households play a role in reducing inequality, and globalisation can provide important opportunities. Domestic actors need to focus on reducing female mortality, narrowing education and earnings disparities, increasing women’s voice, and limiting gender inequality across generations. The international community needs to ensure consistent support, improve the availability of gender-disaggregated data, and extend partnerships beyond governments and development agencies.

The development of gender on the international agenda

The concept of gender emerged with Ester Boserup’s influential work in the early 1970s which challenged the notion of women as passive beneficiaries of development. She called for a focus on Women in Development (WID), to acknowledge the contributions of women’s often invisible labour. Following frustration with the slow progress of WID, other approaches emerged that criticised the WID approach as being one of simply ‘add women and stir’. The Women and Development (WAD) approach emphasised the need for structural changes in the global political economy.

The Gender and Development (GAD) approach followed, focusing on larger inequities and unequal relations. GAD advocates called for a deeper understanding of the socially constructed basis of gender differences and how this impacts on relationships between men and women. They argued for an improved understanding of power relations and the gendered nature of systems and institutions which impact on the lives of women and men. Rather than incorporating women into the current patriarchal system, GAD advocates argued for the transformation of the system into one characterised by gender equality.

Further, states have continued to call for progress towards gender equality through a number of international agreements, regional platforms and conferences. At the 1995 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, the most influential conference to date, states committed themselves (in the Beijing Platform for Action) to establishing mechanisms to promote women’s rights – including national action plans, gender strategies and legal frameworks.

In 2000, states confirmed their commitment to reducing gender inequalities through the United Nations Millennium Declaration. This was articulated specifically in Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 3 which called for the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Three indicators were chosen to represent this goal: i) the ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education; ii) the share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and iii) the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament. Gender equality is also essential in order to achieve the other seven MDGs. In the post-2015 process to decide what goals, if any, should follow the MDGs, gender has remained a core concern. Some advocates have called for a standalone goal on gender, while others have promoted gender targets within each goal.

While progress has been made to highlight women’s issues and experiences in development programmes, national laws and political decisions, attention to gender is often inconsistent. In addition, insufficient funds are allocated to ensure that gender equality is an important part of these programmes and policies. Many scholars and practitioners argue that the aim of the ‘gender agenda’ – the transformation of unequal, unjust power relations – has been largely ignored.

Cornwall, A. (2007). ‘Revisiting the ‘Gender Agenda’’, IDS Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 2, pp.69-78 This article examines how the term ‘gender’ found its way into development and explores the consequences of the transposition of an activist analytical category onto the world of aid. It points out the simplifications and slogans that have accompanied its ‘mainstreaming’ and challenges the assumptions on which these ideas have come to depend. It argues for a renewed focus on analysing and transforming unequal and unjust power relations.

OECD. (2013). Gender equality and women’s rights in the post-2015 agenda: A foundation for sustainable development. OECD And Post-2015 Reflections. Element 3, Paper 1. This policy paper puts forward the OECD’s position on gender in the post-2015 goals. It recommends that the new goals contain a strong standalone goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as integrating gender-specific targets and indicators in the other goals. It states that making girls and women visible in development agendas encourages governments and donors to take action. It suggests that the post-2015 framework needs to take a holistic approach: 1) addressing girls’ completion of a quality education, 2) women’s economic empowerment, 3) universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, 4) ending violence against women and girls, 5) women’s voice, leadership and influence, 6) women’s participation in peace and security, 7) women’s contributions to environmental sustainability. See full text

UN Women. (2013). A Transformative Stand-Alone Goal On Achieving Gender Equality, Women’s Rights And Women’s Empowerment. In the context of the Post-2015 Development framework and Sustainable Development Goals. UN Women. UN Women’s position paper on the post-2015 goals on gender equality and women’s rights suggests that a transformative approach is needed. It calls for action to address structural impediments for women’s empowerment, such as violence against women, unpaid care work, limited control over assets and property, and unequal participation in private and public decision-making. The paper suggests integrating gender equality concerns throughout other goals, and a standalone goal covering three core areas, with associated targets and indicators for each: freedom from violence for women and girls; gender equality in the distribution of capabilities; and gender equality in decision-making power See full text

See also more information about the Beijing Platform for Action and the MDGs .

Data on gender

While high quality data is generally difficult to come by in developing countries, it is even less common that high quality sex-disaggregated data is available. In particular, data related to women’s contributions in the informal economy, gender-based violence and harmful traditional practices is very rare. This makes it difficult to fully understand the experiences of women and men and to ensure that programmes are targeted where they can be most effective. Further, data disaggregated by age is also infrequently available, making it difficult to understand differences between women and girls, and men and boys. Some research and evaluations of development programmes have relied on qualitative data rather than quantitative data. This reliance is criticised by some groups as not being rigorous enough.

It is important to acknowledge, however, that gender- and age-disaggregation of data is only the first step. Data and analysis of the power differentials or underlying causes for these differences is also needed. Ideally, what is required is a mix of quantitative and qualitative data and analysis that presents evidence of what the differences are and why those differences exist.

For further discussion and resources on gender data, see the ‘ Monitoring and evaluation’ chapter of this guide.

Gender relations are upheld by both informal and formal institutions. Informal institutions are usually referred to as “long-lasting codes of conduct, norms, traditions […] that contribute to gender inequality in all spheres of life” (Branisa et al 2009, cited in Jones et al 2010, p. 10). Formal institutions (economic, political, legal and social) include political systems and labour markets. These two spheres interact with local cultures to determine gender outcomes. Social institutions that have been identified as particularly negative for women and girls include discriminatory family codes, son bias, physical insecurity, limited resource rights and entitlements, and cultural restrictions on women’s movement and other liberties (Jones et al 2010). Formal institutions can have both intended and unintended negative impacts on women. For example, laws, such as Shariah, which specifically state that a man’s and a woman’s witness are of different value have an intended discriminatory effect. A policy which requires land titles as a precondition for receiving agricultural credit may have the unintended effect of excluding women because land ownership is generally concentrated among male family members. Allowing for the placement of two names (a husband’s and wife’s) on land titles could help to address this problem.

Jones, N. et al (2010). ‘Stemming Girls’ Chronic Poverty: Catalysing Development Change by Building Just Social Institutions’, Chronic Poverty Research Centre Do social institutions result in gender differences in the incidence of poverty? This paper finds that discriminatory family codes, son bias, limited resource entitlements, physical insecurity and restricted civil liberties play a role in chronic poverty, specifically that of young women. It is therefore important to: eliminate gender discrimination through legal provisions; support girls’ participation in decision-making; invest in child- and gender-sensitive social protection; extend services to hard-to-reach girls; strengthen girls’ resource access; and promote girls’ control over their bodies.

Gender relations through the lifecycle

Gender dynamics and relations change throughout the course of the lifecycle. Status in the household is often determined by age, marriage, number of children, disability, economic resources and educational level attained. Girls, including adolescent girls, often have the lowest status in the household, especially in societies where families need to pay dowry and where the daughters are sent to live with the husband’s family upon marriage. Recent research has identified adolescent girls as particularly vulnerable and susceptible to gender-based discrimination including sexual violence, forced and early marriage, dropping out of school and risk of death during childbirth. Early marriage and early pregnancy can have adverse affects on girls’ health, and may inhibit their ability to take advantage of educational and job opportunities.

Daughters-in-law and unmarried women are also considered to have low status in some cultures as they are seen as outsiders or burdens on the family. Widows and married women who have been abandoned by their husbands may also face stigma and lack of status.

Families often choose to invest in boys as the future earners and caretakers of the family. This enables boys to grow up having higher status in the household than girls and better income generating opportunities. While status generally increases according to age for both men and women, it increases disproportionally for men.

UNICEF. (2006). ‘Panel 1: Gender Discrimination Across the Life Cycle’ in The State of the World’s Children 2007: Women and Children: The Double Dividend of Gender Equality, UNICEF, New York See full text

See also this guide’s chapter on Gender-based violence.

Household roles

Household status determines the roles of different family members. Men are often assumed to be the head of the household and responsible for providing financially for the family, while women and girls are responsible for household chores, such as caring for children, cleaning, fetching water and cooking. While women are now increasingly able to take up paid employment, this often does not involve a reduction in their domestic responsibilities, leading to the ‘double burden’ of women’s domestic and productive roles. The time required to perform domestic chores also limits women’s access to paid employment and their participation in civil society and politics.

While investing in boys’ education is often viewed as a long-term strategy, the pressure on men to earn money can in some instances lead to boys being taken out of school to help support the family financially. Girls, on the other hand, are more likely to be taken out of school because the family is unable to afford their school fees and/or relies on girls to help with domestic chores and childcare.

Although it is often assumed that households are headed by males, this is not always the case. In situations of conflict, displacement, labour migration or abandonment, female-headed households may be more common. These are often among the poorest and most vulnerable households.

Kabeer, N. (2007). ‘Marriage, Motherhood and Masculinity in the Global Economy: Reconfigurations of Personal and Economic Life’, IDS Working Paper 290, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton Is the rise of women in the labour market changing the perception of their role in the home? This study explores how women and men are dealing with the feminisation of labour markets in the face of the prevalence of male breadwinner ideologies and the apparent threat to male authority represented by women’s earnings. It shows that most working women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of domestic responsibility. Women may be using their newly acquired earning power to challenge the injustice of the double work burden, but policymakers are still failing to provide support for women’s care responsibilities.

Esplen, E. (2009). ‘Gender and Care: Overview Report’, BRIDGE Cutting Edge Pack, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. This article examines the core issues around care – why it is important, how it conflicts with women’s rights, and addressing the main challenges. It posits that care work should be recognised as important, and that it should not be the sole responsibility of women. It provides examples of programmes which have expanded women’s choices and opportunities. It also reviews policies which can increase the value accorded to care work. See full text

Control over resources and decision-making

While not always the case, men are more commonly the heads of the household and the breadwinners of the family. This has often translated into men making the family’s financial and non-financial decisions – such as when daughters get married and to whom, whether the wife can work outside of the household, whether to use contraception and who gets the most food. In agricultural societies where women often do most of the work, male family members often own the land and make the agricultural decisions. Because of women’s lower bargaining position in the household, their decision-making is often limited and can be confined to childrearing concerns and domestic tasks. Factors that exacerbate women’s low bargaining positions include large age gaps between husband and wife, which intensify already existing gender inequalities, cultural factors that devalue women’s unpaid work, lower levels of education and economic dependence.

Women have in some instances been able to find ways of negotiating control over resources and decision making. Women are frequently tasked with budgeting for the household either through resources provided by the husband or through petty trading and agricultural labour. In some cases, women are seen as household financial managers. In other cases, while women may not control the household income, they adopt various strategies to ensure they can access part of these resources. These may include hiding money and lying about expenditures, to ensure that they can pay for food and children’s schooling. Interventions aimed explicitly at strengthening women’s control over resources, such as conditional cash transfers, can be particularly beneficial.

Apusigah, A. (2009). ‘The Gendered Politics of Farm Household Production and the Shaping of Women’s Livelihoods in Northern Ghana’ in Feminist Africa, No 12, pp 51-68 How does the gendered politics of farm household production affect women’s livelihoods? This study focuses on livelihoods-based interests in farm land and non-violent conflict situations in northern Ghana. It argues that the social positioning of women and whether they work on the land or not are important determinants of their livelihood possibilities.

Doss, C. (2013). Intrahousehold bargaining and resource allocation in developing countries. The World Bank Research Observer, 28(1), 52-78. This article provides an overview of the quantitative literature on intra-household resource allocation, and summarises the main observations and insights relevant to policy-makers. It reviews theoretical models from the last thirty years, and examines different forms of bargaining – between spouses, between parents and children, and between other household members. It reviews the possibility of showing causation rather than correlation, and which outcomes of women’s bargaining are reasonably well-established. It concludes women’s bargaining power affects household decisions, although it is hard to prove causality. See full text

Unequal power relations do not fall only along gender lines. In addition to gender, individuals can be discriminated against for a number of reasons including ethnicity and race, religion, caste, age, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and geographic location. When gender intersects with other axes of marginalisation, women are more likely to experience multiple layers of discrimination. In some cases, these other forms of discrimination can be more intense than gender discrimination. An ethnic minority man can be less powerful and more discriminated against than a middle class woman from a majority ethnic group, although a female from this same ethnic minority group could face even greater discrimination.

Intersectionality is a tool used to better understand how these discriminations materialise and intersect. It is based on an understanding that men and women have layered identities which have resulted from social relations, history and power structures. Through a deeper appreciation of multiple identities and consequent patterns of discrimination, more effective responses can be tailored.

Chow, E.N., Segal, M.T., & Lin, T. (2011). Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts. Volume 15 of Advances in gender research. Emerald Group Publishing. This book collates papers from a 2009 conference on “Gender and Social Transformation: Global, Transnational, and Local Realities and Perspectives”. It contextualises experiences of intersectionality and inequality, social exclusion and powerlessness. It situates these experiences theoretically and provides connecting overviews on how those facing intersectional challenges are the most vulnerable. See full text

Hankivsky, O. (2012). Women’s health, men’s health, and gender and health: implications of intersectionality. Social science & medicine, 74(11), 1712-1720. This paper examines the specific intersectionality of gender with equitable access to health. It examines the difficulties of understanding the different factors which influence access to health. It states that gender and/or sex are usually the primary dimensions used to understand health experiences, but this simplifies and undermines the complexities of access. Using an intersectional analysis transforms the understanding of access to healthcare. Gender is not always the most salient or meaningful category, and it may be more beneficial to use an intersectional approach. This should allow a deeper and more nuanced analysis and policy prescriptions. See full text

Watson, C., Hamilton Harding, J. & Harper, C. (2013). Adolescent girls, capabilities and gender justice: Review of the literature for East Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia. London: ODI. This Background Note synthesises the results of three extensive gender literature reviews exploring the extent to which gender justice for adolescent girls is shaped by formal and informal laws, norms, attitudes and practices that limit them in the attainment and exercise of their capabilities. It describes the political, social, economic and cultural context in which girls live, and describes the intersectional poverty of being both young and a girl. See full text

Gender analyses and programmes have often come to define gender as ‘women’, forgetting or ignoring the different ways in which men and boys are affected by gender power structures and systems and how this intersects with different axes of power. Like women, men play diverse roles in society, the economy and household. Men have multiple ‘masculinities’, some of which involve dominance and others subordination (Cornwall et al, 2011). Recent discussions of masculinity have emphasised the need to engage with the structures that sustain gender inequality.

Excluding boys and men from gender analysis reduces the impact interventions can have on gender inequality. Putting the pressure on women as the only agents of change can also be considered an ethical issue, given the number of other challenges that poor women are forced to confront.

Where men and boys are included in analysis, they are often framed as problems, rather than as positive actors. For example, unemployment and the structural exclusion of young men has been linked to an increased risk of engagement in violence. Young men in such instances are often perceived as a security threat. In many contexts, however, youth who suffer from exclusion do not get involved in violence and can be positive agents of change.

In addition, older men are often seen as barriers to women’s empowerment. While small-scale programmes that work with men and boys demonstrate some success towards more gender equitable attitudes, focusing on or including boys and men remains controversial. Some feminists fear that such a focus diverts both attention and resources away from women’s rights work.

It is becoming increasingly acknowledged that there is a need to better understand how the gendered identities of boys and men are formed and how they can be better mobilised as a force for gender equality. For example, Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (2012-2018) highlights the importance of male champions in ensuring the security of women and girls. Men and boys can be powerful advocates for gender equality, helping to reduce and prevent violence against women and ensure that women’s needs are taken into account and included as crucial elements in peace negotiations and at international fora.

Van der Gaag, N. (2011). ‘Because I Am a Girl: The State of the World’s Girls 2011: So, What About Boys?’, Because I Am A Girl Series, Plan International This annual report on the state of the world’s girls addresses boys and men. It argues that they should be involved in addressing gender inequality, both as power-holders and as a group suffering from negative gender stereotypes. It emphasises the role of fathers, families and schools in shaping gender relations. Fathers can set an example for their families by sharing household responsibilities, expressing emotions, and treating his sons, daughters and wife equally. In schools, both pre-school and secondary schooling for boys have positive effects on gender equality, through learning positive behaviour, and decreasing violence against women and girls. See full text

Cornwall, A., Erdström, J. and Greig, A. (2011). ‘Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities’, Zed Books, London This book challenges the neglect of the structural dimensions of patriarchal power relations in current development policy and practice, and the failure to adequately engage with the effects of inequitable sex and gender orders on both men’s and women’s lives. It calls for renewed engagement in efforts to challenge and change stereotypes of men, to dismantle the structural barriers to gender equality, and to mobilise men to build new alliances with women’s movements and other movements for social and gender justice. See full text

Hilker, L. M. and Fraser, E. M. (2009). ‘Youth Exclusion, Violence, Conflict and Fragile States’, Report prepared for DFID, Social Development Direct, London What is the evidence on the links between youth exclusion, violence, conflict and fragile states? The paper highlights factors which can contribute to youth violence, and makes recommendations for DFID’s work on youth exclusion and violence. There is statistical evidence of a link between high relative youth populations and an increased risk of armed conflict. However, statistical relationships have their limitations. They cannot be used as a sole predictor of conflict in specific areas and reveal little about the causal processes. It is also important that youth are not generally viewed as a security ‘threat’. A key factor driving youth involvement in violence is the structural exclusion and lack of opportunities faced by many young people. These block the transition to adulthood and can lead to frustration, disillusionment and, in some cases, participation in violence.

Australian Government. (2012). ‘Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, 2012-2018’, Australian Government Office for Women, Canberra The NAP consolidates and builds on the existing programme of work to integrate a gender perspective into peace and security efforts, protect women and girls’ human rights, particularly in relation to gender-based violence, and promote their participation in conflict prevention, management and resolution. See full text

Barker, G., Contreras, J. M., Heilman, B., Singh, A. K., Verma, R. K., & Nascimento, M. (2011). Evolving men: initial results from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES). Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Promundo. From 2009 to 2010, household surveys were administered to more than 8,000 men and 3,500 women ages 18 to 59 in Brazil, Chile, Croatia, India, Mexico and Rwanda. The key findings are that there is general trend for younger, more educated men and men with gender-equitable role models show more gender-equitable behaviour. Most men were not in delivery room for the birth of their last child, but nearly half do some daily caregiving. 25 to 40 per cent of men reported physical intimate partner violence. Between 16 percent and 56 percent of men say they have paid for sex at least once. See full text

Farre, L. (2013). The role of men in the economic and social development of women: implications for gender equality. Washington D.C.: The Worldbank. How does male behaviour affect female outcomes in the promotion of gender equality? This survey first summarizes recent studies on the distribution of power within the family and identifies several factors that have altered the bargaining position of men and women over the last decades. It then reviews empirical work on the contribution of men, as fathers and husbands, to the health and socioeconomic outcomes of women in both developed and developing countries. Finally, it discusses a set of economic policies that have intentionally or unintentionally affected men’s attitudes and behaviours. The main implication is that policies meant to achieve gender equality should focus on men rather than exclusively target women.

For further resources, see the Masculinity section of Eldis .

National governments and donors (such as CIDA, DFID and DFAT) have developed a number of strategies, tools and resources to ensure their development programmes take account of gender inequality. These strategies include organisational gender mainstreaming, conducting gender analysis, and gender assessments to determine impacts of programmes, strategies and laws.

Progress in implementing these strategies and thus increasing gender awareness and gender equality has been slow and ad hoc. Reasons for this include a lack of commitment on behalf of stakeholders and insufficient resource allocation. Gaps in the collection, compilation and reporting of gender-sensitive data also present a significant challenge to effective gender analysis. While gender issues are often acknowledged as important, states and donors often give them lower priority, considering other aspects of development – such as democracy, poverty or conflict – more urgent.

AusAID. (2011). ‘AusAID’s Promoting Opportunities for All: Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment’, AusAID, Canberra This paper lays out the Australian government’s strategy for opportunities for all. It develops four pillars:

• Pillar 1: Advancing equal access to gender-responsive health and education services
• Pillar 2: Increasing women’s voice in decision-making, leadership and peace-building
• Pillar 3: Empowering women economically and improving their livelihood security
• Pillar 4: Ending violence against women and girls at home, in their communities and in disaster and conflict situations

Pillar 1 has had the most investment and success. There are persistent challenges in the other pillars. See full text

DFID. (2011). A New Strategic Vision for Girls and Women: Stopping Poverty Before it Starts. Department for International Development. This is DFID’s strategic vision paper from the coalition government. It takes a different direction from the previous Gender Equality Action Plan (GEAP) for 2007-2010. Its four pillars for action are: 1) delay first pregnancy and support safe childbirth; 2) get economic assets directly to girls and women; 3) get girls through secondary school; and 4) prevent violence against girls and women. It draws on empowerment theory about widening girls’ and women’s access to choices. A variety of programmatic approaches are recommended. See full text

UNIFEM. (2010). ‘Making the MDGs Work Better for Women: Implementing Gender-Responsive National Development Plans and Programmes’, UNIFEM, New York This policy report from the UN draws on good practice from the last ten years in strategies for accelerating progress towards the MDGs. It recognises that many donors and governments have expressed strong commitment to gender equality, but find it challenging to turn this into action. The paper outlines some lessons on how this can be achieved. See full text

Gender analysis and assessments

Gender analysis is the process of assessing the impact that a development programme may have on men and women and on gender relations in general (Hunt 2004). Gender analysis can be used for a number of reasons including: i) to ensure that men and women are not disadvantaged by any particular activities or strategies; ii) to identify priority areas for action to promote equality; iii) to assess gendered differences in participation or resource allocation; and iv) to build capacity and commitment to gender equality.

A number of tools have been developed to assess gender equality progress within organisations and programmes. These include: i) participatory gender audits, which aim to promote organisational learning on how to practically and effectively mainstream gender; ii) project toolkits such as checklists which are lists of questions to help programme staff remember gender differences and potential gendered impacts; and iii) scorecards which contain concrete performance indicators to assess progress. Most development organisations have developed their own gender analysis tools to suit their needs.

Gender mainstreaming

Gender mainstreaming is the process of ensuring that gender is considered at all times, both within agencies (institutionally) and programmes (operationally). As these are closely interlinked, gender mainstreaming must be implemented both institutionally and operationally to be successful. A donor agency unable to recognise the challenges faced by its own female staff, for example, would struggle to understand the gender impacts of its programmes.

Since committing to the Beijing Platform for Action, most donors, national governments and NGOs have put in place gender mainstreaming policies. Some donors have also incorporated other intersections of discriminations: UNHCR’s Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming Strategy is considered an example of international best practice.

However, progress with gender mainstreaming remains inconsistent, and often suffers from insufficient commitment (usually from senior management), insufficient resource allocation and insufficient understanding of gender issues by staff at all levels. For example, an evaluation of gender mainstreaming in UNHABITAT found that while the agency has sought to mainstream gender into core areas of its work, these efforts are not uniform in strength across the agency. In addition, a key challenge of gender mainstreaming is the possibility that if gender is a concern to all staff (rather than a specific gender unit), there may be a tendency for no one to actually draw attention to gender issues and to take action. To counteract this problem, gender experts now recommend a twin-track approach using both mainstreaming and gender-focused units.

Thomas, V. and Beck, T. (2010). ‘Changing the Way UNHCR Does Business? An Evaluation of the Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming Strategy, 2004-2009’ UNHCR, Geneva The evaluation concludes that despite some good progress UNHCR still has difficulties in achieving its strategic goals, and in successfully mainstreaming age, gender and diversity at all operational levels. The strategy signalled a significant shift in direction, and as such, needs a long timeframe to implement. It shifted away from a legal understanding of protection for refugees, to one which includes social and economic aspects. It has rigorous accountability, but does not have a clear vision of what the organisation should look like. See full text

USAID (2010). ‘Guide on How to Integrate Disability into Gender Assessments and Analyses’, USAID See full text

Earle, L. and Mikkelsen, B. (2011). ‘Evaluation of Gender Mainstreaming in UN-HABITAT’, UNHABITAT, Nairobi This evaluation assesses UN-HABITAT’s efforts to mainstream gender, finding that it has maintained good efforts in mainstreaming, but with uneven application across contexts. It has several staff members and units responsible for gender mainstreaming. It has produced a number of research documents on men’s and women’s different shelter needs, and has provided capacity building on gender to local government institutions. It has also supported women’s legal rights to property and land ownership. See full text

Special Issue: Beyond Gender Mainstreaming, Gender & Development, vol. 20, no. 3. (2012). This special issue contains 14 articles on gender mainstreaming at the current time. It ranges from micro level programme analysis to macro policy issues, and looks at how we can move forward from persistent problems with mainstreaming. Despite gender’s prominence in most agencies and policies, most actors still remain focused on economic development goals, rather than transformative human development goals. See full text

Risby, L. A., & Todd, D. (2012). Mainstreaming gender equality: A road to results or a road to nowhere?. Operations Evaluation Department, African Development Bank Group. This paper synthesises gender mainstreaming experiences from bilateral and multilateral donor agencies to highlight trends, commonalities, challenges and good practices. This synthesis looks at 26 thematic and country evaluations undertaken between 1990 and 2010. The main finding is that gender mainstreaming has not been widely carried out, and there is poor data on whether changes in gender equality have been achieved. See full text

Mcloughlin, C. (2010). ‘Child Marriage’, GSDRC Helpdesk Research Report, GSDRC, Birmingham

For further information on donor approaches to gender analysis and mainstreaming, see the ‘ Donor approaches to gender ’ section of this guide.

• Gender mainstreaming on Eldis
• Women Living Under Muslim Laws
• The Because I am a Girl series by Plan International
• The section of the World Bank’s website on gender tools .

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Gender Equality

The unfinished business of our time.

Women and girls represent half of the world’s population and, therefore, also half of its potential. Gender equality, besides being a fundamental human right, is essential to achieve peaceful societies, with full human potential and sustainable development. Moreover, it has been shown that empowering women spurs productivity and economic growth.

Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go to achieve full equality of rights and opportunities between men and women, warns UN Women. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to end the multiple forms of gender violence and secure equal access to quality education and health, economic resources and participation in political life for both women and girls and men and boys. It is also essential to achieve equal opportunities in access to employment and to positions of leadership and decision-making at all levels.

Guterres highlights that gender equality is more important than ever if we are to create prosperous economies and a healthy planet. However, he admits that we face a critical challenge: an alarming $360 billion annual gender gap by 2030.

To revert this trend, he has identified five key areas that need joint action: Investing in women, ending poverty, implementing gender-responsive financing, shifting to a green economy and care society and supporting feminist change-makers.

The UN Secretary-General, Mr. António Guterres has stated that achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls is the unfinished business of our time, and the greatest human rights challenge in our world.

The United Nations and women

UN support for the rights of women began with the Organization's founding Charter. Among the purposes of the UN declared in  Article 1 of its Charter  is “ To achieve international co-operation … in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion .”

Within the UN’s first year, the Economic and Social Council established its  Commission on the Status of Women , as the principal global policy-making body dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women. Among its earliest accomplishments was ensuring gender neutral language in the draft  Universal Declaration of Human Rights .

Women's rights as a human right

Gender Equality was made part of international human rights law by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. That milestone document in the history of human rights recognized that “ All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights ” and that “ everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, … birth or other status .”

As the international feminist movement began to gain momentum during the 1970s, the General Assembly declared 1975 as the International Women’s Year and organized the first World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City. At the urging of the Conference, it subsequently declared the years 1976-1985 as the  UN Decade for Women , and established a Voluntary Fund for Decade.

In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the  Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) , which is often described as an International Bill of Rights for Women. In its 30 articles, the Convention explicitly defines discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination. The Convention targets culture and tradition as influential forces shaping gender roles and family relations, and it is the first human rights treaty to affirm the reproductive rights of women.

Five years after the Mexico City conference, a Second World Conference on Women was held in Copenhagen in 1980. The resulting Programme of Action called for stronger national measures to ensure women's ownership and control of property, as well as improvements in women's rights with respect to inheritance, child custody and loss of nationality

Birth of Global Feminism

In 1985, the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, was held in Nairobi. It was convened at a time when the movement for gender equality had finally gained true global recognition, and 15,000 representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participated in a parallel NGO Forum.

The event was described by many as “the birth of global feminism”. Realizing that the goals of the Mexico City Conference had not been adequately met, the 157 participating governments adopted the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies to the Year 2000. The document broke new ground by declaring all issues to be women’s issues.

Beijing Conference on Women

The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, went a step further than the Nairobi Conference. The  Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action  asserted women’s rights as human rights and committed to specific actions to ensure respect for those rights. 

Commission on the Status of Women

The  Commission on the Status of Women  (CSW) is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. The CSW is instrumental in promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives throughout the world, and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

The Commission's priorities for the 2021-2024 period are:

• Women’s full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.
• Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes.
• Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.
• Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.

An Organization for Women

On 2 July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously voted to create a single UN body tasked with accelerating progress in achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. The new UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women – or  UN Women  – merged four of the world body’s agencies and offices: the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women.

UN Women focuses on four main areas: promoting women's leadership and political participation, empowering women economically, ending violence against women, and supporting women's full and equal participation in peace processes and security efforts.

Women and the Sustainable Development Goals

Equality and empowerment.

The United Nations is now focusing its global development work on the recently-developed 17  Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) . Women have a  critical role to play  in all of the SDGs, with many targets specifically recognizing women’s equality and empowerment as both the objective, and as part of the solution.

Goal 5 , to "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls" is known as the stand-alone gender goal, because it is dedicated to achieving these ends. Deep legal and legislative changes are needed to ensure women’s rights around the world. While a record 143 countries guaranteed equality between men and women in their Constitutions by 2014, another 52 had not taken this step. 

Stark  gender disparities  remain in economic and political realms. While there has been some progress over the decades, on average women in the labour market still earn 20 per cent less than men globally. As of 2024, only 26.8 per cent of all national parliamentarians were female, a slow rise from 11.3 per cent in 1995.

Eliminating Violence Against Women

The UN system continues to give particular attention to the issue of violence against women. The 1993 General Assembly  Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women  contained “a clear and comprehensive definition of violence against women [and] a clear statement of the rights to be applied to ensure the elimination of violence against women in all its forms”. It represented “a commitment by States in respect of their responsibilities, and a commitment by the international community at large to the elimination of violence against women”.

Violence against women is a pandemic affecting all countries, even those that have made laudable progress in other areas. Worldwide, 30 per cent of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.

In September 2017, the European Union and the United Nations joined forces to launch the  Spotlight Initiative , a global, multi-year initiative that focuses on eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls.

The  International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women  is observed on 25 November.

International Women's Day and other observances

International Women’s Day  is observed annually on 8 March. International Women's Day first emerged from the activities of labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century in North America and across Europe. It is a day, observed by many countries around the world, on which women are recognized for their achievements without regard to divisions, whether national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic or political.

Besides International Women’s Day and the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the UN observes other international days dedicated to raising awareness of different aspects of the struggle for gender equality and women empowerment. On February 6, the  International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation  is observed, February 11 is the  International Day of Women and Girls in Science , June 19 is the  International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict , June 23 is  International Widows' Day , October 11 is the  International Day of the Girl Child  and on October 15 the  International Day of Rural Women  is observed.

Gender-inclusive language

Given the key role that language plays in shaping cultural and social attitudes, using gender-inclusive language is a powerful way to promote gender equality and eradicate gender bias.

Being inclusive from a gender language perspective means speaking and writing in a way that does not discriminate against a particular sex, social gender or gender identity, and does not perpetuate gender stereotypes.

These  Guidelines  include recommendations and materials, created to help United Nations staff use gender-inclusive language in any type of communication — oral or written, formal or informal — and are a useful starting point for anyone.

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Fostering gender equality in the workplace: a holistic approach, popular essay topics.

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Gender equality and education

Gender equality is a global priority at UNESCO. Globally, 122 million girls and 128 million boys are out of school. Women still account for almost two-thirds of all adults unable to read.

UNESCO calls for attention to gender equality throughout the education system in relation to access, content, teaching and learning context and practices, learning outcomes, and life and work opportunities. The  UNESCO Strategy for gender equality in and through education (2019-2025)  focuses on a system-wide transformation to benefit all learners equally in three key areas: better data to inform action, better legal and policy frameworks to advance rights and better teaching and learning practices to empower. 

What you need to know about education and gender equality

"her education, our future" documentary film.

Released on 7 March for 2024 International Women’s Day, “Her Education, Our Future” is a documentary film following the lives of Anee, Fabiana, Mkasi and Tainá – four young women across three continents who struggle to fulfill their right to education. 

This documentary film offers a spectacular dive into the transformative power of education and showcases how empowering girls and women through education improves not only their lives, but also those of their families, communities and indeed all of society. 

Global Accountability Dashboard

The Global Accountability Dashboard is a one stop resource that monitors country progress against key indicators on gender-transformative education, spotlights actions taken by governments and their partners, and provides an evidence hub of initiatives and good practices from 193 countries.

The Dashboard is supported by the Global Platform for Gender Equality and Girls’ and Women’s Empowerment in and through Education , a multi-stakeholder partnership emerging from the 2022 Transforming Education Summit. It complements and deepens the Summit’s Dashboard of Country Commitments and Action to Transform Education. 

Key figures

of which 122 million are girls and 128 million are boys

of which 56% are women

for every 100 young women

Empowering communities: UNESCO in action

Keeping girls in the picture

Everyone can play a role in supporting girls’ education

UNESCO’s new drive to accelerate action for girls’ and women’s education

2022 GEM Report Gender Report: Deepening the debate on those still left behind

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• From access to empowerment: operational tools to advance gender equality in and through education
• Communication strategy: UNESCO guidance on communicating on gender equality in and through education
• Communication tools
• Keeping girls in the picture: youth advocacy toolkit
• Keeping girls in the picture: community radio toolkit

Monitoring SDG 4: equity and inclusion in education

Resources from UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report.

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• Gender Equality Essay

Introduction to Gender Equality

In a society, everyone has the right to lead his/her life accordingly without any discrimination. When this state is achieved where all individuals are considered to be equal irrespective of their caste, gender, colour, profession, and status, we call it equality. Equality can also be defined as the situation where every individual has the same rights and equal opportunity to grow and prosper. 

Every individual of society dreams for equal rights and access to resources available at their disposal, but there is a lot of discrimination. This discrimination can be due to cultural differences, geographical differences, the colour of the individual, social status and even gender. The most prevalent discrimination is gender inequality. It is not a localised issue and is limited to only certain spheres of life but is prevalent across the globe. Even in progressive societies and top organisations, we can see many examples of gender bias. 

Gender equality can only be achieved when both male and female individuals are treated similarly. But discrimination is a social menace that creates division. We stop being together and stand together to tackle our problems. This social stigma has been creeping into the underbelly of all of society for many centuries. This has also been witnessed in gender-based cases. Gender inequality is the thing of the past as both men and women are creating history in all segments together.

Gender Equality builds a Nation

In this century, women and men enjoy the same privileges. The perception is changing slowly but steadily. People are now becoming more aware of their rights and what they can do in a free society. It has been found that when women and men hold the same position and participate equally, society progresses exclusively and creates a landmark. When a community reaches gender equality, everyone enjoys the same privileges and gets similar scopes in education, health, occupation, and political aspect. Even in the family, when both male and female members are treated in the same way, it is the best place to grow, learn, and add great value.

A nation needs to value every gender equally to progress at the right place. A society attains better development in all aspects when both genders are entitled to similar opportunities. Equal rights in decision making, health, politics, infrastructure, profession, etc will surely advance our society to a new level. The social stigma of women staying inside the house has changed. Nowadays, girls are equally competing with boys in school. They are also creating landmark development in their respective profession. Women are now seeking economic independence before they get married. It gives them the confidence to stand against oppression and make better decisions for themselves.

The age-old social structure dictated that women need to stay inside the home taking care of all when men go out to earn bread and butter. This has been practised for ages when the world outside was not safe. Now that the time has changed and we have successfully made our environment quite safer, women can step forward, get educated, pursue their passion, bring economic balance in their families, and share the weight of a family with men. This, in a cumulative way, will also make a country’s economy progress faster and better.

Methods to measure Gender Equality

Gender equality can be measured and a country’s growth can be traced by using the following methods.

Gender Development Index (GDI) is a gender-based calculation done similar to the Human Development Index. 

Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) is a detailed calculation method of the percentage of female members in decision-making roles. 

Gender Equity Index (GEI) considers economic participation, education, and empowerment.

Global Gender Gap Index assesses the level of gender inequality present on the basis of four criteria: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, health and survival .

According to the Gender Gap Index (GGI), India ranks 140 among 156 participating countries. This denotes that the performance of India has fallen from the previous years, denoting negative growth in terms of closing the gender gap. In the current environment where equality and equal opportunities are considered supreme, this makes India be at a significant disadvantage.

Roadblocks to Gender Equality  

Indian society is still wrecked by such stigmas that dictate that women are meant to manage the home and stay indoors. This is being done for ages, leading to neglect of women in areas like education, health, wealth, and socio-economic fields. 

In addition to that, the dowry system is further crippling society. This ill practice had led to numerous female feticides. It has created a notion that girls are a burden on a family, which is one of the primary reasons a girl child cannot continue her education. Even if they excel in education and become independent, most of them are forced to quit their job as their income is considered a backup source, which is not fair. New-age women are not only independent, but they are confident too. The only thing they demand from society is support, which we should provide them.  

Along with dowry, there is one more burning issue that has a profound impact on women's growth. It is prevalent in all kinds of society and is known as violence. Violence against women is present in one or another form in public and private spaces. Sometimes, violence is accompanied by other burning issues such as exploitation, harassment, and trafficking, making the world unsafe for women. We must take steps to stop this and ensure a safe and healthy place for women.  

Poverty is also one of the major roadblocks towards gender equality. It has led to other malpractices such as child marriage, sale of children, trafficking and child labour, to name a few. Providing equal job opportunities and upliftment of people below the poverty line can help bring some checks onto this.

Initiative Towards Gender Equality

Any kind of discrimination acts as a roadblock in any nation’s growth, and a nation can only prosper when all its citizens have equal rights. Most of the developed countries has comparatively less gender discrimination and provide equal opportunity to both genders. Even the Indian government is taking multiple initiatives to cut down gender discrimination. 

They have initiated a social campaign called “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana” to encourage the education of girl children. Besides this, the government runs multiple other schemes, such as the Women Helpline Scheme, UJJAWALA, National Mission for Empowerment of Women, etc., to generate awareness among the people. Moreover, as responsible citizens, it is our responsibility to spread knowledge on gender discrimination to create a beautiful world for wome n [1] [2] .

FAQs on Gender Equality Essay

1. What Makes Women Unequal to Men?

The social stigmas and beliefs that have been running deeply in the veins of all families make women unequal to men. Women are considered to be a burden by many families and are not provided with the same rights men enjoy in society. We are ill-informed regarding women’s rights and tend to continue age-old practices. This is made worse with social menaces such as the dowry system, child labor, child marriage, etc. Women can gather knowledge, get educated, and compete with men. This is sometimes quite threatening to the false patriarchal society.

2. How can We Promote Gender Equality?

Education is the prime measure to be taken to make society free from such menaces. When we teach our new generation regarding the best social practices and gender equal rights, we can eradicate such menaces aptly. Our society is ill-informed regarding gender equality and rights. Many policies have been designed and implemented by the government. As our country holds the second position in terms of population, it is hard to tackle these gender-based problems. It can only be erased from the deepest point by using education as the prime weapon.

3. Why should Women be Equal to Men?

Women might not be similar to men in terms of physical strength and physiological traits. Both are differently built biologically but they have the same brain and organs to function. Women these days are creating milestones that are changing society. They have traveled to space, running companies, creating history, and making everyone proud. Women are showing their capabilities in every phase and hence, they should be equal to men in all aspects.

4. Mention a few initiatives started by the Indian Government to enable gender equality.

The Indian government has initiated a social campaign called “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana” to encourage girls’ education. Besides this, the government runs multiple other schemes, such as the  Women Helpline Scheme, UJJAWALA, National Mission for Empowerment of Women, etc., to generate awareness among the people.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment

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Since its creation 70 years ago, the UN has achieved important results in advancing gender equality, from the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women - the main global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women - through the adoption of various landmark agreements such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

On the occasion of the General Debate of the 66th Session of the General Assembly held in September 2011, United Nations Secretary-General BAN KI-MOON highlighted in his Report “We the Peoples”, the crucial role of gender equality as driver of development progress, recognizing that the potential of women had not been fully realized, owing to, inter alia, persistent social, economic and political inequalities.

Gender inequalities are still deep-rooted in every society. Women suffer from lack of access to decent work and face occupational segregation and gender wage gaps. In many situations, they are denied access to basic education and health care and are victims of violence and discrimination. They are under-represented in political and economic decision-making processes.

With the aim of better addressing these challenges and to identify a single recognized driver to lead and coordinate UN activities on gender equality issues, UN Women was established in 2010.

UN Women works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls, empowerment of women, and achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.

The vital role of women and the need for their full and equal participation and leadership in all areas of sustainable development was reaffirmed in the Future We Want (paragraph 236-244), as well as in the Open Working Group Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals. Open Working Group Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals . The proposed Sustainable Development Goal 5 addresses this and reads "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls".

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Roundtable discussion on Women in the Economy in France and in the United Arab Emirates

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• January 2015 Beijing+20 Beijing +20 is committed to renew political will and commitment, revitalize public debate through social mobilization and awareness-raising, strengthen evidence-based knowledge as well as enhance resources to achieve gender equality and women empowerment.
• January 2015 SDG 5 Goal 5 aims at achieving gender equality and empower all women and girls. Its targets include end of all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls, as well as elimination of harmful practices and the recognition and value of unpaid care and domestic work. Other targets stress the importance of ensuring women's full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership as well as universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.
• January 2010 UN Women In the framework of the UN Reform Agenda, the UN General Assembly established UN Women to accelerate the Organization’s goals on gender equality and empowerment of women. UN Women was conceived in order to support inter-governmental bodies in the elaboration of policies, norms and global standards, as well as Member States in the implementation of those standards, the leading and the coordination of the UN System in their work on gender equality.
• January 2000 MDG 3 MDG3 aims at promoting gender equality and empowering women. Its target 3.A focuses on the need to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.
• January 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action The Fourth World Conference on Women produced the Beijing Declaration and its Platform of Action, unanimously adopted by 189 countries and considered as the most progressive scheme and road map for advancing women’s rights. As a defining framework for change, the Platform for Action made comprehensive commitments under 12 critical areas of concern, namely, women and poverty, education and training of women, women and health, violence against women, women and armed conflict, women and the economy, women in power and decision-making, institutional mechanism for the advancement of women, human rights of women, women and the media, women and the environment and the girl- child. The conference represented a crucial milestone in the progress of gender equality and empowerment of women.
• January 1994 PoA The 20-year Programme of Action was adopted by 179 countries, on the occasion of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo in 1994 and aimed to provide a new vision of the links between population, development and individual well-being. The Programme recognized the importance of empowerment of women, gender equality as well as reproductive health and rights as issues at the core of any population and development programmes.
• January 1979 CEDAW Often considered as an international bill of rights for women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly. It defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination. According to the Convention, discrimination against women can be defined as "any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field".
• January 1975 World Conf. Int. Women&#039;s Year The First World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City in 1975, reuniting 133 governments and designing a World Plan of Action for the Implementation of the Objectives of the International Women’s Year, providing measures and indications for the advancement of women for the upcoming decade. Furthermore, 6000 NGOs Representatives took part to a parallel forum, the Women’s Year Tribute.
• January 1946 CSW Established by the Economic and Social Council with Resolution 11(II), adopted on 21st June 1946, the Commission was first mandated to prepare recommendations and reports to ECOSOC to promote women’s rights in political, economic, social and educational fields, as well as make recommendations on urgent matters requiring immediate attention as well as submit proposals to the Council regarding its terms of references. In 1996, thanks to ECOSOC Resolution 1996/6, its mandate was extended, recognizing to the Commission a leading role in the monitoring and review process of the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

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Gender equality through school: providing a safe and inclusive learning environment

Credit: Khumais

Boys and girls must feel welcome in a safe and secure learning environment. Governments, schools, teachers and students all have a part to play in ensuring that schools are free of violence and discrimination and provide a gender-sensitive, good-quality education (Figure 16). To achieve this, governments can develop nondiscriminatory curricula, facilitate teacher education and make sure sanitation facilities are adequate. Schools are responsible for addressing school-related violence and providing comprehensive health education. Teachers should follow professional norms regarding appropriate disciplinary practices and provide unbiased instruction. And students must behave in a non-violent, inclusive way.

FIGURE 16: Who is responsible for what in ensuring gender equality through school

NATIONAL AND SCHOOL POLICIES SHOULD TARGET SCHOOL-RELATED VIOLENCE

School-related violence is a pervasive issue in some countries. Violence can be physical, psychological or sexual; it can occur on school grounds, in transit or in cyberspace; and it may include bullying, corporal punishment, verbal and emotional abuse, intimidation, sexual harassment and assault, gang activity and the presence of weapons among students. It is often perpetrated as a result of gender norms and stereotypes and enforced by unequal power dynamics. It was estimated that, globally, approximately 246 million girls and boys experienced some form of school-related violence in 2014 (UNGEI, 2017).

While the vast majority of teachers are caring professionals who put the best interest of their students first, some abuse their position of power. In West and Central African countries, sexual abuse and exploitation by teachers, school staff and others in position of authority is common practice (Antonowicz, 2010). Sexual violence happens frequently in many schools in South Africa but crimes are rarely investigated and prosecution rates are low (HRW, 2016). In the United Republic of Tanzania, over half of girls and boys who had experienced physical abuse identified a teacher as an abuser (HakiElimu, 2017). In Samoa, 41% of children surveyed in 2013 indicated that they had experienced violence at the hands of their teacher (Office of the Ombudsman and NHRI Samoa, 2015).

Some countries, including Chile, Fiji, Finland, Peru, the Republic of Korea and Sweden, have passed legislation on violence in educational institutions (UNESCO, 2015c, 2017b). The 2013 Anti-Bullying Act in the Philippines requires all schools to adopt policies to prevent and address acts of bullying. It explicitly refers to gender-based bullying, which is described as any act that humiliates or excludes a person on the basis of perceived or actual sexual orientation and gender identity. Yet in the following year just 38% of schools had adopted child protection or anti-bullying policies. The low rate highlighted a lack of communication and a weak monitoring framework.

The Department of Education responded by issuing a memorandum to clarify submission requirements and is working to build implementation capacity (UNESCO, 2015c). Teacher education and codes of conduct can help change teacher attitudes and behaviours. In South Sudan, the UNICEF Communities Care programme engaged with teachers to challenge norms that enable sexual violence and brought about some shifts in teacher attitudes and behaviours (UNGEI, 2017). The Doorways programme in Burkina Faso, Ghana and Malawi trained upper primary and lower secondary school teachers on children’s rights and responsibilities, alternative teaching practices, basic counselling and listening skills, awareness of sexual harassment at school and teacher code of conduct (DevTech Systems, 2008; Queen et al., 2015). The Communication for Change project trained teachers in the Democratic Republic of Congo to act as first responders when they witnessed school-related gender-based violence. The share of participating teachers who were aware of how to prevent gender-based violence in school increased from 56% to 95% after the intervention (C-Change, 2013). Teacher codes of conduct are generally written by teacher unions to guide their members. They promote professional accountability by giving peers a way to hold each other to account for adhering to norms (Poisson, 2009). A recent survey by Education International found that teacher codes of conduct were present in 26 of 50 countries surveyed (EI, 2017). A separate review of 24 countries found that over half of teachers believed the code of conduct had a very significant impact in reducing misconduct (McKelvie-Sebileau, 2011).

Teacher codes of conduct can be effective in reducing school-related gender-based violence if they explicitly refer to violence and abuse and include clear breach reporting and enforcement protocols. Mongolia’s Teachers Code of Ethics for General Education Schools and Kindergartens contains a section on teacher ethical norms, which specifies that teachers should protect student’s health and well-being, including from sexual abuse, and should ensure equal participation without discrimination, including on the basis of sex (Steiner-Khamsi and Batjargal, 2017). Kenya has a range of penalties for breach of professional conduct, including suspension and interdiction. Teachers convicted of sexual offences against students are deregistered (Kenya Teachers Service Commission, 2013). However, even when they exist, these codes are not always successfully disseminated.

The implementation of Ethiopia’s Code of Conduct on Prevention of School-Related Gender-Based Violence in Schools has been patchy. Some school staff reportedly lacked commitment to or a sense of ownership of the code (Parkes et al., 2017). Students are also responsible for ensuring their behaviour does not impinge on others’ right to education (UNICEF and UNESCO, 2007). Schools are increasingly implementing prevention-oriented models to teach students acceptable strategies for interacting with their peers (Horner et al., 2010). These models set clear guidelines for students and define consistent instruction, record-keeping and follow-up procedures for teachers and other adults, such as administrative and custodial staff, playground supervisors, cafeteria workers and parent and community volunteers (Lewis et al., 2014).

Students are more likely to show positive social behaviours and reduce negative behaviours after the implementation of such programmes (Durlak et al., 2011). There is also increasing evidence linking improved social skills to academic achievement (Horner et al., 2010). While these codes of conduct are mostly used in Europe and North America (Sklad et al., 2012), Asian countries such as Singapore have also begun adopting them (Durlak et al., 2011).

GENDER-SENSITIVE FACILITIES CAN INCREASE THE TIME GIRLS SPEND IN SCHOOL

Inadequate sanitation facilities for girls during menstruation can have a negative effect on school attendance. Among 145 countries with data, primary school access to basic sanitation facilities was below 50% in 28 countries, 17 of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Only limited data are available on whether girls have separate facilities, let alone whether the facilities are functional or well maintained. In only 9 of 44 countries did more than 75% of primary schools have single-sex facilities; in Benin and Comoros, under 5% of schools had single-sex facilities. An estimated one in ten African girls miss school during menstruation (HRW, 2016).

Regulations requiring separate toilet facilities for boys and girls can help. Yet analysis of regulations in 71 education systems by the GEM Report team shows that only 61% required sex-separate facilities for public schools and 66% for private schools (UNESCO, 2017a). Regulations alone are not sufficient to ensure facilities are available. Although separate sanitation facilities are mandated by regulations in Bangladesh, a survey found that in 2014 only 12% of girls reported access to female-only toilets with water and soap available. Combined with a lack of waste bins, the poor facilities contributed to girls missing school during menstruation. Two in five girls were absent during menstruation for an average of three days during each cycle (Alam et al., 2014). Girls in Haiti have reported having to go home to change the materials they use to manage their menstruation, resulting in lost instructional time (HRW, 2016).

School inspections play a key role in ensuring that schools adhere to regulations. However, inspections do not always take gender issues into account. In Sweden, the school inspectorate takes gender equality into consideration (Heikkilä, 2016) and in the United Kingdom inspectors evaluate equal opportunities in the classroom and whether the school provides an inclusive environment for boys and girls (Rogers, 2014). By contrast, gender issues are rarely included in inspections in Bangladesh, with sex-separate sanitation facilities only occasionally observed (Chatterley et al., 2014). In any case, inspectorates are severely constrained by human resource shortages in many poor countries. For instance, in Mvomero district, United Republic of Tanzania, although 80% of schools are supposed to be inspected annually, only one in five schools were inspected in 2013 (Holvoet, 2015).

GENDER EQUALITY IN EDUCATION REQUIRES UNBIASED CURRICULA AND TEXTBOOKS

To facilitate gender-responsive instruction, curricula and textbooks should be free from gender bias and promote equality in gender relations. How students perceive themselves and how they project their role in society is shaped to some extent by what they experience at school, including by how they are represented in textbooks.

Comprehensive sexuality education

School-based comprehensive sexuality education programmes equip children and young people with empowering knowledge, skills and attitudes. In many contexts, programmes focus almost exclusively on HIV as a motivator to encourage students to delay sexual activity and have fewer sexual partners and less frequent sexual contacts (Fonner et al., 2014). However, international guidelines and standards, along with emerging evidence about factors influencing programme effectiveness, increasingly stress the value of a comprehensive approach centred on gender and human rights (Ketting and Winkelmann, 2013). A review of 22 studies showed that comprehensive sexuality education programmes that addressed gender power relations were five times more likely to be effective in reducing rates of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy than those that did not (Haberland, 2015).

In 2009, UNESCO and other UN agencies published the revised International Technical Guidance on Sexual Education to provide an evidence-based, age-appropriate set of topics and learning objectives for comprehensive sexuality education programmes for students aged 5 to 18 (UNESCO, 2009). In 2010, the International Planned Parenthood Federation adopted a rights-based approach in its Framework for Comprehensive Sexuality Education, and the WHO Regional Office for Europe produced Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe as a framework for policy-makers and education and health authorities (WHO Regional Office for Europe and BZgA, 2010). Nearly ten years after the original report, UNESCO’s revised guidance expands coverage to both school-based and out-of-school programmes with a strong focus on human rights, gender equality and skills building. The guidance can act as both an advocacy and accountability tool for programme implementers, NGOs, and youth (UNESCO, 2018).

A 2015 review of the status of comprehensive sexuality education in 48 countries found that almost 80% had supportive policies or strategies. Despite this political will, a significant gap remained between policies and implementation (UNESCO, 2015b). In western and central Africa, UNESCO’s Sexuality Education Review and Assessment Tool was used to assess 10 out of 13 national sexuality education programmes. Fewer than half the curricula met global standards for required content for all age groups, with gender and social norms identified as the weakest areas (Herat et al., 2014; UNESCO and UNFPA, 2012).

Recent studies in Ghana and Kenya provided evidence of gaps in content and delivery. The Kenya study covered 78 public and private secondary schools. While 75% of teachers reported teaching all topics of a comprehensive sexuality education programme, only 2% of students reported learning all topics. Only 20% learned about types of contraceptive methods, and even fewer learned how to use and where to get them (Figure 17). In some cases, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate information was taught. Almost 60% of teachers incorrectly taught that condoms alone were not effective in pregnancy prevention (Sidze et al., 2017). Moreover, 71% of teachers emphasized abstinence as the best or only method to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and most depicted sex as dangerous or immoral for young people.

FIGURE 17: In Kenya, only one in five students reported learning about contraceptive methods

Barriers to effective implementation of comprehensive programmes include lack of well-trained teachers, poor support of schools, weak regulation and supervision of policy implementation, opposition from religious and conservative groups, and culturally imposed silence about sexuality. In the Ghana study, 77% of teachers reported lacking resources or teaching materials. A smaller share reported conflicts, embarrassment or opposition from the community or students on moral or religious grounds (Awusabo-Asare et al., 2017).

Textbooks increasingly cover gender issues but progress is insufficient

Self-reporting from governments in Cuba, Estonia, Finland, Mexico, Nicaragua, Slovenia and Spain indicates that gender equality is integrated into national school curricula (UN Human Rights Council, 2017). The Ministry of Education, Culture, Science equality as one of the key values in its new core curriculum (Steiner-Khamsi and Batjargal, 2017).

Over the past 50 years, mentions of women and women’s rights in textbooks have increased (Bromley et al., 2016; Nakagawa and Wotipka, 2016). Nevertheless, in many countries women remain under-represented or, when included, are relegated to traditional roles such as housework and childcare (UNESCO, 2016a). Women accounted for only 37% of images in primary and secondary school textbooks in the Islamic Republic of

Iran in 2006–2007 (Paivandi, 2008) and across nine Jordanian secondary school history books only 21% of images were female. From Sweden to the Syrian Arab Republic, despite governments explicitly identifying the importance of gender equality in textbooks, women and men were still routinely portrayed in a stereotypical manner (Bromley et al., 2016).

Both governments and civil society can act to reduce textbook biases. The Human Rights Council has made it clear that ‘states have an obligation to periodically review and revise curricula, textbooks, programmes and teaching methods to ensure that they do not perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes’ (UN Human Rights Council, 2017). Some states include an explicit gender analysis as part of their textbook and review process. In Viet Nam, the National Strategy on Gender Equality for 2011–2020 specifies that textbook content should be reviewed for gender stereotypes (UNESCO, 2016c). In Ghana, the Textbook Development and Distribution Policy for Pre-tertiary Education included gender sensitivity as one of the main criteria for evaluating textbook proposals (Ghana MOE, 2001). By contrast, the Pakistan National Textbook and Learning Materials Policy and Plan of Action does not mention gender as a criterion of textbook review, referring instead to ‘quality of content, presentation, language and specific provincial coverage’ (Pakistan MOE, 2007).

Textbook monitoring by parents and civil society can be effective. In South Africa, a parent’s question posted on Facebook in July 2016 inspired a petition that ultimately led the textbook publisher to amend and issue an apology for content that promoted blaming the victim for sexual assault (Davies, 2016).

TEACHER EDUCATION CAN HELP ADDRESS UNDERLYING GENDER BIASES

Aside from the influence of official curricula and textbooks, teacher practice in the classroom is partly shaped by their assumptions and stereotypes about gender, which in turn affects students’ beliefs and learning. In Australia, female teachers felt particularly responsible for boys’ underachievement relative to male teachers (Hodgetts, 2010). In the United States, anxiety expressed by female mathematics teachers was associated with female students’ belief in the stereotype that boys are better at mathematics (Beilock et al., 2010).

Teacher education can assist teachers to reflect on and overcome their biases. Formal initiatives in teacher education with a focus on gender have taken place in Italy, the Republic of Moldova and Sudan (OHCHR, 2015). In Spain, the University of Oviedo requires teacher candidates to complete a mandatory course on gender and education (Bourn et al., 2017). In Ankara, Turkey preservice teachers that took a semester long course on gender equity in education developed more gender sensitive attitudes (Erden, 2009).

In low and middle income countries, teacher education programmes are often externally funded. The UNESCO Regional Bureau in Bangkok has recently funded a five-year project, Enhancing Girls’ and Women’s Right to Quality Education through Gender Sensitive Policy Making, Teacher Development and Pedagogy, which focuses on training participants from Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan to conduct gender assessments in teacher education (UNESCO, 2016b).

In Karamoja region, Uganda, the UNICEF Gender Socialization in Schools programme trained over 1,000 primary school teachers to enhance their knowledge, attitudes and practices related to gender equality promotion and conflict resolution. The initial training lasted for two days and was followed by two refresher training sessions. A subset of teachers received reinforcing text messages reminding them of examples of good practice. However, while the programme improved teachers’ knowledge and attitudes on gender equality, classroom practices did not become more gender-responsive (American Institutes for Research and UNICEF, 2016; El-Bushra and Smith, 2016).

Nigeria updated its teacher education curriculum in 2012, in part to address gender issues (Unterhalter et al., 2015). While a policy is in place to ensure minimum standards on gender equality, a survey of 4,500 student teachers in 2014 showed that very few had an in-depth understanding of what gender equality in education might mean, while many were hostile to women’s participation in public life and any form of social engagement. Among respondents employed following graduation, teachers reported receiving no professional development on gender, a point echoed by other colleagues at the schools where they taught. Teachers who had the most egalitarian ideas about gender reported themselves the most frustrated of respondents and said that they were unable to put their ideas into practice (Unterhalter et al., 2017).

The examples from Uganda and Nigeria highlight some of the challenges in changing teacher practices. To be effective, teacher education and training need to be continuous to recognize the time it takes for such practices to change. They also need to incorporate other stakeholders to help build a more supportive environment.

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• Open access
• Published: 23 August 2024

Nationwide surveys of awareness of tuberculosis in India uncover a gender gap in tuberculosis awareness

• Ranganath Thimmanahalli Sobagaiah 1 ,
• Nitu Kumari 2 ,
• Divya Bharathi Gattam 3 &
• Mohammed Shoyaib Khazi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4682-0306 4  

Communications Medicine volume  4 , Article number:  168 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

• Epidemiology
• Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis remains a major challenge in India, with an estimated 2.69 million cases each year. Although men are more affected than women, gender differences and related factors affect awareness of tuberculosis and thus impact tuberculosis diagnosis and access to treatment. Understanding the gender-specific needs and complexities when diagnosing and treating tuberculosis is essential to manage cases in India.

We undertook a comparative study using data from three National Family and Health Surveys (NFHS), specifically NFHS-3, NFHS-4 and NFHS-5. We investigated the prevalence and gender disparity in awareness about tuberculosis, and associated factors, using regression analysis.

Most men and women surveyed are between the ages of 15 and 19. Across the surveys, the proportion of men and women who are unaware of spreading of tuberculosis decreases from 44.9% during NFHS 3 to 29.6% during NFHS 5. However, the prevalence ratio of men to women with no knowledge about modes of transmission of Tuberculosis increases from 0.92 during NFHS 3 to 0.98 during NFHS 5. Higher odds with younger age (NFHS 5, aOR: 1.07 (1.01–1.13)) and rural residency (NFHS 5, aOR: 1.12 (1.06–1.18)), and lower odds with unmarried marital status (NFHS 5, aOR: 0.92 (0.86–0.98)) are noteworthy associations. Women and men have differences in knowledge.

Conclusions

Gender disparity associated with awareness about tuberculosis in India is observed across all three nationwide surveys. Being aged fifteen to nineteen years and residing in rural area are risk factors. Being unmarried is a protective factor for women, but not for men.

Plain Language Summary

Lack of awareness of the spread of tuberculosis may be an important factor contributing to the current burden of disease. We used datasets from three rounds of the National Family Health Survey conducted in India to determine the proportion of men and women who knew how tuberculosis spreads. Using a predictive model, we showed that misconceptions are more common among both men and women. For women, younger age and living in rural areas were risk factors for lack of awareness, which was not the case for men. Such differences may represent a barrier to reducing the burden of disease. These findings can be used to develop gender-specific, comprehensive people awareness programs to raise awareness about tuberculosis.

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Introduction.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease vastly influenced and prevented by the social factors in the community. Lack of knowledge regarding the disease can contribute to underuse of medical services, delay in diagnosis and poor treatment adherence in people living with tuberculosis. Enhancing the dissemination of information on tuberculosis to increase the public awareness and health promotion is crucial to achieve the global targets for reduction in disease burden of tuberculosis. Studies have revealed that irrespective of a general overview about the disease, there is a breach in knowledge regarding the transmission, diagnosis, management, and its prevention. Also, poor knowledge or comprehension of tuberculosis disease and its treatment frequently contributes to non-adherence to therapy 1 , 2 , 3 .

Currently in India, the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme (NTEP) with the development of National Strategic Plan 2017–25 is an ambitious attempt by the Government to eliminate tuberculosis by 2025 4 . Despite being a preventable and curable disease, tuberculosis is the most infectious killer disease attributing to almost 10 million cases per year globally, out of which 1.9 million cases are from India 5 , 6 . Numerous guidelines and tools have been released and made accessible by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) to tackle the problem of tuberculosis. The policies have been constantly updated after gathering considerable implementation-related learnings and the expansion of programme activities is still happening 7 .

Lack of knowledge about TB is a continuing problem and pose a risk for its prevention and care in China 8 . Similar situation can also be expected in India. In addition, because of the lack of knowledge about the disease and fear of being ostracized, persons with TB often hide their symptoms and fail to receive appropriate treatment which is a stumbling block in the prevention and care of the disease 9 .

The trend analysis of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 10 aids to give us key themes to improve the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme’s (NTEP) coverage, quality, equity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Internationally, in countries with high disease burden of tuberculosis, the routine diagnosis of tuberculosis, treatment compliance and health seeking habits are observed to be affected by gender and their knowledge and perception towards the disease 11 , 12 . The overall misconceptions about the transmission of TB ranges from 43–68 percent of women and 35–66 percent of men in all subgroups of background characteristics 13 , 14 .

With the disease burden of 1,933,381 cases from India in 2021 6 , out of which 6% were children aged 0 to 14 years, 58% were men and 36% were women, it becomes even more crucial to address the gap in awareness of transmission of TB among the two genders. Therefore, the Central TB Division formed the National Framework for Gender Responsive Approach to TB in India guidelines which reports that gender differences and inequalities play a crucial role in how people access and receive healthcare due to TB 15 . Gender is an important variable in the incidence, exposure, risks, health seeking behaviour and in treatment outcomes of tuberculosis.

Globally, studies have also shown that men may repress their illnesses knowingly or unknowingly in an effort to avoid being perceived as weak or feminine, or as a form of compensation. They achieve this, among other things, by believing that they are physically superior to women. They ignore disease as they work to fulfil their obligations to support and uplift their families, something many people are finding harder and harder to accomplish 7 . Men perceive control as a fundamental component of acceptable manhood and efforts to obtain it have also led men to put their health on the back burner, men were afraid of being perceived as being less than men 11 , 16 .

In countries like Malawi, role constructions as primary material providers for their immediate family along with the opportunity costs of acknowledging illness seem important barriers to care-seeking. Upon that, Men’s sense of adequacy as providers was influenced by limited employment opportunities and small incomes. It has been suggested that there is a need to address harmful masculinity and promote gender equality to support interventions for TB and chronic cough 16 .

In India, men are more affected with TB compared to women, but women are at a higher risk of manifesting the disease easily due to undernutrition mainly because of social norms which prevent prioritizing of their nutrition, health, and well-being. Whereas men are at the risk of developing TB due to their employment like mining and construction industries 15 .

Moreover, the factors affecting the health seeking due to gender remains the same as that found globally and access to services is greatly impacted by gender disparities that affect care-seeking, as well as health system variables such access restrictions, a lower index of suspicion of TB in women, and the provision of insufficient information to care-seekers 17 .

Across the globe, there has been a trend that the female participation in the surveys exceeded male participation in TB related surveys 18 . During NFHS less number of men were interviewed when compared to women. Hence, gender-specific factors in tuberculosis prevention and treatment can have a wide range such as differences in care-seeking behavior, diagnostic challenges, risk factors, disease burden of HIV and tuberculosis coinfection, and delayed treatment. Addressing these factors is crucial for achieving equity in tuberculosis care and reducing the burden of the disease among both men and women 19 . Another important factor that can be considered is the sex assortativity among the contacts of the existing patients that might have contributed to sex disparities in disease burden of tuberculosis among adults 20 . According to the NFHS-5 data, although, gender influence in knowledge and perception towards the disease affects the tuberculosis management and care, the extent of the influence is not explicitly explored in India.

This study observes the trends in gender influence in awareness of transmission of tuberculosis at national level to understand the factors that affect this. Noteworthy variation in awareness regarding transmission of tuberculosis is observed among men and women at the national level. On exploring the factors that influence TB awareness, interesting results are obtained which have major implications for TB prevention and care initiatives such as the NTEP in India. The most important factors among women are socioeconomic status, rural residence, age, and education. Our results suggest empowering women and promoting the education of mothers could improve TB awareness, a goal of the TB prevention and care program in India.

Study design

It is a cross-sectional study that compares three complex sample surveys of nationally representative population.

Data sources

Datasets of Demographic Health Survey (DHS) which is also known as National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in India. After permission we obtained the recoded datasets for all three NFHS from DHS. Individual Recode file that contains the data on all the women and Mens Recode file that contains data on all men interviewed during NFHS were used in data analysis. These files shall be referred as Womens dataset and Mens dataset in the article.

For NFHS 3 conducted during 2005 to 2006, the survey included participants from 29 states. For NFHS 4 conducted during 2015 to 2016 and NFHS 5 conducted during 2019 to 2021, the survey included participants from all states and union territories.

Sample characteristics

For NFHS surveys, the multistage cluster sampling is adopted along with population proportion to sampling technique.

Participants

NFHS-3 and NFHS-4 adopted different sample designs for data collection. NFHS-3 used a two-stage approach for rural areas and a three-stage approach for urban areas. In rural areas, the first stage involved selecting villages as Primary Sampling Units (PSUs) using probability proportional to population size (PPS), and in the second stage, households were systematically chosen within each village. In urban areas, three stages were used, with the selection of wards, Census Enumeration Blocks (CEBs), and households 21 . NFHS-4 employed a stratified two-stage sample design with the 2011 census serving as the sampling frame. In rural areas, PSUs (villages) were selected using PPS, and the strata were defined based on the number of households and the percentage of the population belonging to scheduled castes and tribes. In urban areas, CEBs were selected using PPS, considering the SC/ST population percentage. Complete household mapping was conducted in selected PSUs, which were segmented into clusters. Random sampling was used to choose clusters, and within each selected cluster, 22 households were randomly selected in the second stage of data collection. This design resulted in NFHS-4 clusters being either complete PSUs or segments of PSUs 22 . NFHS-5 used the same sample design as that of NFHS-4 21 . From each household one woman from the eligible age group was selected randomly for interview. However for men, during NFHS 3, only those men were interviewed who were usual residents of the sample household or visitors who stayed in the sample household the night before the survey 21 . However, during NFHS 4 and NFHS 5, only men who were selected only in the subsample of households selected for the state module 22 , 23 . In addition to the above, during NFHS 3, the union territories were not considered. Moreover, Telangana was formed in June 2014. Therefore, it is not available as a separate state in NFHS 3. Similarly, Ladakh as a union territory was formed in October 2019. Hence it is not available as a separate state or union territory in NFHS 4.

A total of 74369 cases in Mens dataset and 124385 cases in Womens dataset during NFHS 3, 112122 cases in Mens dataset and 169686 cases in Womens dataset during NFHS 4 and 101839 cases in Mens dataset and 724115 cases in Womens dataset during NFHS 5 were available. Inclusion criteria for analysis for our research was, first: age group of the respondent between 15 to 45 years of age, and second was “Yes” as response to the question: Ever heard about tuberculosis. Detailed inclusion criteria are given in Supplementary Figs.  1 and  2 .

We created the variable on awareness about tuberculosis based on the respondent’s response as “Yes” or “No” to the following questions that were asked during NFHS survey:

Q1: Tuberculosis spread by: Air when coughing or sneezing.

Q2: Tuberculosis spread by: Sharing utensils.

Q3: Tuberculosis spread by: Touching a person with tuberculosis.

Q4: Tuberculosis spread by: Food.

Q5: Tuberculosis spread by: Sexual contact.

Q6: Tuberculosis spread by: Mosquito bites.

Based on the responses, we derived four categories in the dependent variable which are as follows: Category 1: Knowledge without misconceptions: if the response was “Yes” to Q1 and “No” to all other questions. Category 2: Knowledge with misconceptions: if the response was “Yes” to Q1 and “Yes” to any other questions from Q2 to Q6. Category 3: No knowledge without misconceptions: if the response was “No” to all questions from Q1 to Q6. Category 4: No knowledge with misconceptions: if the response was “No” to Q1 and “Yes” to any other questions from Q2 to Q6. For data representation and analysis, Category 3 and Category 4 were added and was considered as single category. Category 1 was used as reference for regression analysis. The categorization in the dependent variable was made based on previous study 24 .

Independent

Based on the review of literature 15 , we selected the following variables for the regression model.

Age in five-year groups

The current age of the respondent was divided into groups of five years each. The participants from all surveys selected in the study were belonging to the age group of fifteen to forty-five years of age. Age group of 45 to 49 years was used as reference category.

Type of place of residence

It is where the respondent was interviewed as either urban or rural which was created based on whether the cluster or sample point number is defined as urban or rural and urban area was considered as a reference category.

Region in which the respondent was interviewed. During NFHS 3, only twenty-nine states were included. However, during NFHS 4 and NFHS 5, states along with Union Territories were also included in the survey. Kerala state was taken as a reference category.

Highest education level

This is a standardized variable providing level of education in the following categories: No education, Primary, Secondary, and Higher which was used as reference category.

Wealth Index

The wealth index is a composite measure of a household’s cumulative living standard. The wealth index is calculated using easy-to-collect data on a household’s ownership of selected assets, such as televisions and bicycles; materials used for housing construction; and types of water access and sanitation facilities. Richest category was used for reference in regression analysis.

Current marital status

It is the current marital status of the respondent. The original variable in the dataset was recoded to form three categories as the distribution of data among various categories in the original variable was skewed. The recoded variable had three categories: “Never married”, “Married” and “Others” which was used as reference category.

Response to the question

Tuberculosis can be cured: The response had three categories: “No”, “Yes” and “Don’t know”. The response “Yes” was taken as reference category.

Keep secret if family member gets tuberculosis: The response had three categories: “No”, “Yes, remain a secret” and “Don’t know/Not sure/It depends”. Response “No” was taken as reference category.

Frequency of reading newspaper or magazine

The response had four categories: “Not at all”, “Less than once a week”, “at least once a week” and “almost every day”.

Frequency of listening to radio

The response was had four categories like those of frequency of reading newspaper or magazine.

Frequency of watching television

The response was had four categories like those of frequency of reading newspaper or magazine. Reference category for frequency of reading newspaper or magazine, listening to radio and watching television was “at least once a week” for regression analysis.

During NFHS 3, the Men’s Questionnaire was employed to interview men aged 15–54 who were usual residents of the sample household or visitors who stayed in the sample household the night before the survey 21 . However, during NFHS 4 and NFHS 5, the Men’s Questionnaire was administered only in the subsample of households selected for the state module 14 , 21 . Hence, the number of cases in the Mens dataset are less in number when compared to those in Womens dataset. Moreover, those who were not interviewed may have contributed notably to the results of our study.

64,212 cases from Mens dataset and 109,032 cases from Womens dataset file for NFHS 3, 91,293 cases from Mens dataset and 61,8274 cases from Womens dataset for NFHS 4 and 85,751 cases from Mens dataset and 671,750 cases from Womens dataset for NFHS 5 were included in the study for further analysis.

Ethical considerations

Our study used secondary data for analysis from the datasets provided by the Demographic Health Surveys Program (DHS). We applied for access, and this was granted based on us providing information about our planned use. All the datasets provided were re coded and already anonymized to completely protect the privacy of the survey participants. Informed consent was obtained from the participant or guardian (for children) before the interview for all surveys by DHS 25 . We did not obtain approval from institutional review boards as the data we were using was deidentified and recoded, that has already been reviewed for privacy and ethical concerns before by DHS. Moreover, this data is available public domain in form of datasets and national and state level reports. The authors were not allowed to share the datasets with each other. Hence all authors have obtained authorization to use the datasets separately from DHS.

Statistics and reproducibility

The datasets were imported to STATA® MP 4 core v17, and declaration for survey design for each dataset was done for weights, primary sampling unit and strata as per instructions by DHS in order to accommodate for stratification by province and state, size group. Dependent variables were computed and required independent variables were recoded. Association between categorical variables was assessed using design adjusted Chi square test. Further, Multinominal Logistic Regression analysis was used to derive adjusted odds ratio with Category 1 as the reference category in the dependent variable. The regression models were derived separately for men and women. Subsequently Poissons Regression analysis was used to derive adjusted prevalence ratio for similar models as it is difficult to interpret an odds ratio for a cross-sectional study as there is confusion between risk or odds leading to incorrect quantitative interpretation 26 . Moreover, the prevalence of no knowledge was higher than 10% and the odds ratio would overestimate the prevalence ratio. However, due to the limitation of Poissons regression with svy commands, in the dependent variable was converted into binomial variable combining Category 1 and Category 2 into a single category as “Knowledge about the spread of Tuberculosis” and Category 3 and Category 4 into a single category as “No knowledge about the spread of Tuberculosis”. All the statistical analysis was carried out under the subset of svy commands that has inherent property for measures similar to robust measures for poisons regression 27 . Microsoft® Excel 365 was used to make line charts. QGIS® Desktop 3.30.1 was used to make maps for prevalence ratio of Men: Women of No knowledge about spreading tuberculosis among men and women. To limit the length of the manuscript, the details on odds ratio are given in the main manuscript and details on prevalence ratio are given in the Supplementary Table No.  7 to Supplementary Table No.  10 .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the  Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

In NFHS 3, 64,212 cases from Mens dataset (containing data from interview of eligible men at household) and 109,032 cases from Womens dataset (containing data from interview of eligible women at household) were included as they fulfilled inclusion criteria. Similarly, from NFHS 4, 91,293 cases from Mens dataset and 618,274 cases from Womens dataset were included for analysis. In addition to the above, from NFHS 5, 85,751 cases from Mens dataset and 691,750 cases from Womens dataset were included for analysis.

Descriptive data

In NFHS 3, 18.26% men and 19.93% women were from the age group fifteen to nineteen years. 38.00% of the men were residing in urban area whereas 64.53% women were residing in rural areas. Most of the men and women had Secondary level of education and belonged to richest level of wealth index. More than half of them were married. While highest proportion of the men belonged from Central zone followed by South zone, most of the women were from Central zone followed by East and South zone in similar proportion. 36.41% men read newspaper or magazine, 25.23% listened to the radio, and 47.83% watched television almost every day. However, for most of the women watching television daily was the only mode of exposure to mass media on almost daily basis. More than 50% of the women never read newspaper or magazine or listened to radio. More than 75% believed that tuberculosis can be cured and would not keep a secret if family member gets tuberculosis.

In NFHS 4, the proportions for age group, level of education, wealth index, current marital status, belief that tuberculosis can be cured, belonging to zone and response for keeping secret if family member gets tuberculosis, were like those in NFHS 3 among men. However, most of the women belonged to the age group twenty to twenty-four years followed by fifteen to nineteen years. Among women similar proportions as that of NFHS 3 were seen with respect to reading newspaper or magazine, listening to radio, and watching television. However, more than 60% of both men and women resided in rural area. In addition to that, among men only 34.53% red newspaper or magazine, and only 6.98% listened to radio and 63.28% watched television almost every day. There was a major change in proportion among men for frequency of mode of exposure to mass media with respect to and listening to radio and watching television.

In NFHS 5, like that in NFHS 4, the proportion of majority of men and women remained unchanged in terms of, type of place of residence, education level, current marital status, belief that tuberculosis can be cured, and response to the question that will they keep secret if family member gets tuberculosis. Among women most of them belonged to the age group of fifteen to nineteen years. In addition to that, most of the men belonged from East zone followed by West zone. Also, there was an increase in proportion of men and women who would never read a newspaper or magazine and listen to radio. In addition to that, there were no respondents who would read newspaper or magazine, listen to radio, or watch television almost every day among both men and women who participated in NFHS 5.

The detailed distribution of eligible men and women during three NFHS surveys are given in Tables  1 and  2 respectively. Moreover, the state and union territory wise distribution for eligible men and women is given in Supplementary Table No.  1 and Supplementary Table No.  2 respectively.

Trend of Knowledge and Misconceptions about spreading to tuberculosis:

Across three surveys, there has been a decrease in the proportion of men who had “No knowledge” and consequently rise in proportion of those who had knowledge about spreading of tuberculosis. Moreover, during NFHS 4, the proportion of those with “No Knowledge” was less than that of those who “Had Knowledge”. In addition to that, from NFHS 4 to NFHS 5, there is an increase in proportion of those who “Had knowledge with misconceptions” but decrease in the proportion of those men who “Had knowledge without misconceptions” about the spread of tuberculosis. Hence there was an increase of misconceptions among men. (Fig.  1 ).

Proportion of knowledge and misconceptions about spreading of tuberculosis among men.

Across three surveys, there has been a decrease in the proportion of women who had “No knowledge” and consequently rise proportion of women who “Had knowledge” about the spread of tuberculosis. However, the proportion of women with “No Knowledge” has always been higher than that of those who “Had knowledge without misconception”. The difference between those who “Had knowledge without misconception” and those who “Had knowledge with misconceptions” about the spread of tuberculosis had been increasing. Hence, there was an increase of misconceptions among women. (Fig.  2 ).

Proportion of knowledge and misconceptions about spreading of tuberculosis among women.

For comparison of prevalence of “No knowledge” about spreading tuberculosis among men and women across the states, during NFHS 3, NFHS 4 and NFHS 5 are presented as Prevalence Ratio on geographical basis on map of India with political boundaries denoting state and union territories. (Figs.  3 , 4 and 5 respectively)

Prevalence ratio of men: women for no knowledge regarding spreading of TB during NFHS 3.

Prevalence ratio of men: women for no knowledge regarding spreading of TB during NFHS 4.

Prevalence ratio of men: women for no knowledge regarding spreading of TB during NFHS 5.

Outcome data

Adjusted odds ratio for men and women for various factors affecting the response as “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis.

Main results

The Crude odds ratio for the independent variables for men and women during three rounds of NFHS is given in Supplementary Table No.  3 and Supplementary Table No.  4 respectively. While any age group was not a significant factor among men, among women the age group of fifteen to twenty four years had higher odds of having “No knowledge” about the spread of tuberculosis during NFHS 3 (aOR: 1.28 (1.12–1.44) for age group fifteen to nineteen years and 1.15 (1.03–1.28) for age group of twenty to twenty four years) and NFHS 5 (aOR: 1.07 (1.01–1.13) for both age groups) and it was statistically significant.

Like the age groups, residing in rural areas was not a significant factor among men. However, women had the higher odds ratio of “No knowledge” who were residing in rural areas and the odds had marginal change across three surveys (aOR: 1.18 (1.07–1.30) during NFHS 3, aOR: 1.09 (1.03–1.14) during NFHS 4 and aOR: 1.12 (1.06–1.18) during NFHS 5) and it was statistically significant. It shows that there has been a disparity between men and women with respect to residing in rural areas.

Education level

No education has constantly been associated significantly with higher odds ratio of having “No knowledge” about spread of tuberculosis among both men and women, however the odds ratio were higher among women (aOR: 2.72 (2.37–3.11) during NFHS 3, aOR: 2.08 (1.96–2.22) during NFHS 4 aOR: 1.66 (1.57–1.76) during NFHS 5) when compared to men through three surveys and the difference of odds ratio between men and women have been decreasing.

For both genders, all categories of wealth index were associated significantly with higher odds ratio of “No Knowledge” about spread of tuberculosis and the odds ratio were highest among the respondents belonging to the poorest category of wealth index during NFHS 3 and NFHS 4. However, during NFHS 5, among men only those belonging to the poorest category of wealth index were associated with higher odds ratio.

For men the marital status was not a significant factor. However, among women never married had lesser odds ratio of “No knowledge” about spreading tuberculosis during NFHS 3 and NFHS 5 which was statistically significant.

Tuberculosis can be cured

Both among men and women those who believed that tuberculosis cannot be cured, were associated with higher odds ratio of having “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis. Among men the odds ratio had increased during NFHS 5 (aOR: 1.95 (1.62–2.34)) when compared to NFHS 3 (aOR: 1.74 (1.51–2.00)). However, among women the odds ratio had decreased during NFHS 5 (aOR: 1.62 (1.54–1.71)) when compared to NFHS 3 (aOR: 1.76 (1.57–1.98)) and these findings were statistically significant.

Would keep secret if family member gets tuberculosis

For men, only during NFHS 5 had higher odds ratio (aOR: 1.21 (1.05–1.39)) for “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis if they wanted keep secret if family member gets tuberculosis. However, for women, the odds ratio of “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis were higher during all three surveys. Moreover, the odds ratio among women have reduced over time marginally. ((aOR 1.27 (1.16–1.38) in NFSH 3, aOR: 1.23 (1.17–1.30) in NFHS 4 and aOR: 1.26 (1.16–1.38) in NFHS 5).

Not reading newspaper or magazine at all among men was associated with increased odds ratio of having “No knowledge” about spreading tuberculosis among men during NFHS 3 (aOR: 1.33 (1.16–1.50)) and NFHS 4 (aOR: 1.24 (1.12–1.36)) only. However, the odds ratio was insignificant during NFHS 5. Among women not reading newspaper or magazine at all was associated with increased odds ratio of having “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis during three surveys. In addition to that the odds ratio had decreased from NFHS 3 (aOR: 1.23 (1.12–1.35)) to NFHS 5 (aOR: 1.16 (1.10–1.22)).

Among both genders, not listening to radio was associated with higher odds ratio of having “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis during NFHS 3. How ever during NFHS 5, the odds ratio were insignificant in males and protective among females (aOR: 0.93 (0.86–0.99)).

For men not watching television at was associated with increased odds ratio of “No knowledge” about spread of tuberculosis during NFHS 4 (aOR: 1.14 (1.02–1.27)). However, among females, not watching television at all was associated with increased odds ratio during NFHS 3 (aOR: 1.12 (1.01–1.24)) and NFHS 5 (aOR: 1.08 (1.04–1.12)).

The detailed adjusted odds ratio for men and women are given in Tables  3 and  4 respectively.

Other analyses

In our regression model for all three surveys, we included the State or Union Territory of residence of respondents to derive aOR for residents of other states and union territories when compared to the residents of the state Kerala. During NFHS 3 for men, the highest odds ratio for “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis was among those who were residing in Jharkhand (aOR: 11.02 (6.71–18.10)) followed by Madhya Pradesh (aOR: 4.96 (3.43–7.17)). Similarly, during NFHS 4 the highest odds ratio was among those who were residing in Uttarakhand (aOR: 7.33 (5.07–10.58)) followed by Himachal Pradesh (aOR: 6.04 (4.44–8.21)). However, during NFHS 5, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu (aOR: 47.76 (24.25–94.07)) had the highest odds ratio followed by Bihar (aOR: 14.49 (10.02–20.97)). For women, during NFHS 3, the highest odds ratio for having “No knowledge” about spreading of tuberculosis was among those who were residing in Bihar (aOR: 15.00 (10.52–21.38)) followed by Assam (aOR: 10.07 (7.82–12.96)). Similarly, during NFHS 4, the highest odds ratio was among those who were residing in Jharkhand (aOR: 14.93 (13.18–16.90)) followed by Assam (aOR 8.49 (7.47–9.63)). However, during NFHS 5, the highest odds ratio was in those women who were residing in Bihar (aOR: 31.36 (27.65–35.57)) followed by Jharkhand (aOR: 25.46 (22.16–29.25)).

The detailed adjusted odds ratio for men and women for state and union territories is given in Supplementary Table 5 and Supplementary Table  6 respectively.

The details on unadjusted and adjusted Prevalence Ratio for Men and Women are given in Supplementary Table  7 to Supplementary Table  10 .

India being a signatory to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 28 , we are currently implementing National Strategic Plan (NSP – 2017–2025) 29 , 30 and envision tuberculosis free India by 2025. In order to achieve this goal, there is a need to adopt a comprehensive approach to gender specific and gender sensitive interventions 15 . This study was undertaken to find out gender disparity and its associated factors regarding awareness of tuberculosis in India by comparing data of three nationwide surveys viz. NFHS-3, NFHS-4 and NFHS-5.

Across the three surveys comparison, we found that there has been a decrease in the proportion of men with “no knowledge” about the spread of tuberculosis and consequently rise in proportion of those who had knowledge over the stretch of years in India. This depicts success of various strategies involved to increase public awareness viz. availability of health information sources in vernacular language and according to local needs; regular training of concerned human resources and promotion of e- learning modes. Moreover, the decrease in the proportion of women who had “no knowledge” was more as compared to men, may be due to improved access of women to electronic media via mobile and internet usage, which could not be assessed due to limitations of the study and may also be due to inclusion of females in health manpower. Moreover, the proportion of men and women with knowledge about the spread of tuberculosis was associated with misconception regarding awareness of tuberculosis transmission which can be attributed to easier access to electronic media via mobile and internet and also lack of awareness of trusted sources of correct information regarding health-related states, particularly TB. In addition, it points towards gender being an important social construct which influences the level of awareness of people about health and illness. As per social norms men have a greater public involvement and hence greater exposure to information, which leads to greater awareness about tuberculosis among men 31 . A previous study from Gujarat showed similar findings of higher proportion of men with better knowledge. It was seen that men were more aware about the mode of transmission and symptoms of tuberculosis 32 . Another study from Nanded, Maharashtra showed similar finding of higher knowledge (33.6%) and more positive attitude (53%) in men about tuberculosis compared to women 33 .

In present study, age was an important risk factor which is associated with gender disparity in awareness regarding tuberculosis transmission. Women in age group of fifteen to nineteen years age and twenty to twenty-four years of age were having “no knowledge” about the spread of tuberculosis when compared to men in same age group. Our analysis was concordant to previous similar studies which showed that women with higher age group are more aware and knowledgeable about TB 34 , 35 , 36 . Increase in age may add more health experience, hence, better aware about TB and identify the mode of infection. In addition to that, culturally higher aged women in India enjoy greater autonomy and freedom than younger one, thus find little or no hindrance in order to seek medical help for self thus more aware and knowledgeable than younger one 37 .

Overall, the analysis shows that the odds among those with “no education” having lesser awareness of tuberculosis transmission have reduced in both men and women but still the odds were more in women as compared to men over the years. As women with higher education have higher odds for awareness and correct knowledge regarding spread of TB, it was in the line with other studies 38 , 39 . It could be that educated people have greater access to various sources of information leading to more awareness about health, availability of healthcare services and use this awareness and information in accessing the health care services 40 , 41 .

Furthermore, women residing in rural area and belonging to low income households were acting as a risk factor for decreased awareness on transmission of tuberculosis, while, such was not the case among men, which is in line with similar other studies 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 . Women with better socio-economic status and those in urban areas are more likely to have better access to health, better media access to TB information, as well as good communication, transportation, and other necessities 35 , 46 . In addition, the rural-urban divide in knowledge and awareness can also attribute to awareness disparity depending upon the place of residence. Therefore, urbanized women and from higher socioeconomic backgrounds have a much better chance than women from rural areas and lower socioeconomic backgrounds of meeting their needs and demands thus knowledge and awareness regarding TB 47 .

It is also found that women who would like to keep it a secret if any member suffers from tuberculosis have higher odds of having no knowledge about spread of tuberculosis than men during NFHS 3 and NFHS 4 which was not so during NFHS 5. Its probable explanation could be that women with more hindrance feel lesser autonomy in terms of medical seeking behaviour thus do not easily disclose a family member’s tuberculosis 47 . During NFHS 5 there was an overlap in the odds for men and women thus eliminating the gender disparity. Usually, NFHS is completed within a year. However, NFHS 5 was completed in three years that is from 2019 to 2021. The duration of completion of survey was increased due to lockdown. However, we are of the opinion that the pandemic has not affected awareness about the methods of spreading tuberculosis in a notable way. The results can be generalised to whole population of the country as the NFHS was conducted among the nationally representative population in the country.

Various strategies to improve access to knowledge regarding tuberculosis and its transmission include creating a culture of evidence-based decision-making by the use of ICT based applications from grass root level upwards, supporting integration and improvement in TB information systems, including NIKSHAY for achievement of TB elimination goals and establishing a TB Knowledge Network (TBKN), inter-connecting all knowledge and research institutions in the country through a virtual network. The overarching role will be to establish a backbone connectivity which will enable knowledge and information sharing amongst TBKN connected institutes, enabling collaborative research, development and innovation amongst TBKN connected institutes, facilitating advanced distance education in specialized sub-areas of TB, facilitating connection between different sectoral networks in the field of research.

The key strategy is to move towards an e-learning mode utilizing the web based and mobile based learning experiences and translating the content to vernacular language and adding relevant content as per local needs at the State level. There has been also high visibility media campaign involving Amitabh Bacchan, India’s biggest film star and an ex-TB patient, as the TB brand ambassador, a big impact on conveying the threat of TB to the public at large. Moreover, TB Champions from amongst patients, technical experts, political representatives, public figures, sportsperson, and celebrities added their voice to increase visibility and action on TB. Substantial efforts have been made towards capacity building of programme managers, state IEC officers and communication facilitators with dedicated national, regional and state level trainings and workshops, to increase awareness about TB 29 .

This study has few limitations such as since it is secondary data analysis, all aspects about knowledge and awareness of tuberculosis could not be explored. Secondly, NFHS which produced the data for this study, was based on respondents’ self-reported information, with no objective validation of the information provided. Furthermore, the dataset of women used in the analysis is limited to the reproductive age group women (fifteen years to forty-nine years of age), which is insufficient to generalize the result for all the women. Similarly, elderly men dataset is not available for analysis. The proportion of men included in the survey was not comparable to that of women. Lastly, since the data for this study came from a cross-sectional survey, we were only able to look at the association between independent and dependent variables and hence any conclusions about causality could not be drawn. In the models derived using Poisson’s Regression providing Prevalence Ratio, multiple independent variables can be seen having a varied level of significance, when compared with Odds Ratio Logistic Regression providing Relative Risk Ratio. This can be attributed to the fact that Poisson’s Regression was derived after converting the dependent variable into a binomial variable for the feasibility of the statistical analysis based on the available expertise of the authors.

Based upon our study, we recommend increased usage of mass media and social media platforms for disseminating health education, since television and radio as media of communication does not hold much value in today’s era. Future research should investigate the reasons that could explain the unexplained differences in tuberculosis awareness, knowledge, and attitude amongst men and women. Moreover, frequent community health contact activities considering gender- specific needs in tuberculosis prevention and care initiatives should be promoted. Furthermore, the fear of stigma and discrimination in different ways at their homes, workplaces, healthcare settings and in communities may prevent people, women, and transgenders, from seeking healthcare. This can be tackled by adopting social behaviour change communication (SBCC) campaigns, especially targeting women, may yield greater results in tuberculosis awareness and knowledge, leading to better tuberculosis notification rates, hence, achieve the goal of ending tuberculosis in India by 2025.

Data availability

The datasets that support the findings of this study are available from DHS at https://dhsprogram.com/ but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study. Though the datasets are available in the public domain, a formal request is required to be placed with DHS which should mention the project details such as Title, Objectives and description of tentative analysis that will be carried out. The numerical data for the Figs.  1 and  2 can be found in file named Supplementary Table  11 . Further, the numerical data for Figs.  3 ,  4 and  5 is provided in Supplementary Tables  12 , 13 and 14 respectively.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank DHS for approving the authorization to use datasets and providing datasets free of cost upon request. The authors would like to state that we did not receive any external funding for our work. This research project was entirely self-funded, and we did not have the support of any grants or other funding sources.

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World College of Medical Sciences and Research, Jhajjar, India

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Kempegowda Institute Medical Sciences, Bengaluru, India

Divya Bharathi Gattam

All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Mangalagiri, India

Mohammed Shoyaib Khazi

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Ranganath T S (R.T.S.) conceptualized the study. In addition to that, he performed a review of literature, and supervised the research team. Nitu Kumari (N.K.) and Divya Bharathi G (D.B.G.) curated the data, conducted the investigation for filtering the variables, developed, and validated the methodology, and created the visualizations. K Md Shoyaib (K.M.D.S.) conducted the final statistical analysis on the final datasets. N.K., D.B.G. and K.M.D.S. drafted the manuscript and all authors reviewed, edited, and approved the final manuscript. All authors had complete access to the D.H.S. datasets, which were accessed upon approval of individual requests, by D.H.S. All authors have verified the data.

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Correspondence to Mohammed Shoyaib Khazi .

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Thimmanahalli Sobagaiah, R., Kumari, N., Bharathi Gattam, D. et al. Nationwide surveys of awareness of tuberculosis in India uncover a gender gap in tuberculosis awareness. Commun Med 4 , 168 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-024-00592-x

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Received : 08 June 2023

Accepted : 14 August 2024

Published : 23 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-024-00592-x

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