essay on advantages of gender equality

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• 06 September 2023

Gender equality: the route to a better world

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The Mosuo people of China include sub-communities in which inheritance passes down either the male or the female line. Credit: TPG/Getty

The fight for global gender equality is nowhere close to being won. Take education: in 87 countries, less than half of women and girls complete secondary schooling, according to 2023 data. Afghanistan’s Taliban continues to ban women and girls from secondary schools and universities . Or take reproductive health: abortion rights have been curtailed in 22 US states since the Supreme Court struck down federal protections, depriving women and girls of autonomy and restricting access to sexual and reproductive health care .

SDG 5, whose stated aim is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, is the fifth of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, all of which Nature is examining in a series of editorials. SDG 5 includes targets for ending discrimination and violence against women and girls in both public and private spheres, eradicating child marriage and female genital mutilation, ensuring sexual and reproductive rights, achieving equal representation of women in leadership positions and granting equal rights to economic resources. Globally, the goal is not on track to being achieved, and just a handful of countries have hit all the targets.

How the world should oppose the Taliban’s war on women and girls

In July, the UN introduced two new indices (see go.nature.com/3eus9ue ), the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) and the Global Gender Parity Index (GGPI). The WEI measures women’s ability and freedoms to make their own choices; the GGPI describes the gap between women and men in areas such as health, education, inclusion and decision making. The indices reveal, depressingly, that even achieving a small gender gap does not automatically translate to high levels of women’s empowerment: 114 countries feature in both indices, but countries that do well on both scores cover fewer than 1% of all girls and women.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made things worse, with women bearing the highest burden of extra unpaid childcare when schools needed to close, and subjected to intensified domestic violence. Although child marriages declined from 21% of all marriages in 2016 to 19% in 2022, the pandemic threatened even this incremental progress, pushing up to 10 million more girls into risk of child marriage over the next decade, in addition to the 100 million girls who were at risk before the pandemic.

Of the 14 indicators for SDG 5, only one or two are close to being met by the 2030 deadline. As of 1 January 2023, women occupied 35.4% of seats in local-government assemblies, an increase from 33.9% in 2020 (the target is gender parity by 2030). In 115 countries for which data were available, around three-quarters, on average, of the necessary laws guaranteeing full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights had been enacted. But the UN estimates that worldwide, only 57% of women who are married or in a union make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Systemic discrimination against girls and women by men, in many contexts, remains a colossal barrier to achieving gender equality. But patriarchy is not some “natural order of things” , argues Ruth Mace, an anthropologist at University College London. Hundreds of women-centred societies exist around the world. As the science writer Angela Saini describes in her latest book, The Patriarchs , these are often not the polar opposite of male-dominated systems, but societies in which men and women share decision making .

After Roe v. Wade: dwindling US abortion access is harming health a year later

One example comes from the Mosuo people in China, who have both ‘matrilineal’ and ‘patrilineal’ communities, with rights such as inheritance passing down either the male or female line. Researchers compared outcomes for inflammation and hypertension in men and women in these communities, and found that women in matrilineal societies, in which they have greater autonomy and control over resources, experienced better health outcomes. The researchers found no significant negative effect of matriliny on health outcomes for men ( A.  Z. Reynolds et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 117 , 30324–30327; 2020 ).

When it comes to the SDGs, evidence is emerging that a more gender-equal approach to politics and power benefits many goals. In a study published in May, Nobue Amanuma, deputy director of the Integrated Sustainability Centre at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Hayama, Japan, and two of her colleagues tested whether countries with more women legislators, and more younger legislators, are performing better in the SDGs ( N. Amanuma et al. Environ. Res. Lett. 18 , 054018; 2023 ). They found it was so, with the effect more marked for socio-economic goals such as ending poverty and hunger, than for environmental ones such as climate action or preserving life on land. The researchers recommend further qualitative and quantitative studies to better understand the reasons.

The reality that gender equality leads to better outcomes across other SDGs is not factored, however, into most of the goals themselves. Of the 230 unique indicators of the SDGs, 51 explicitly reference women, girls, gender or sex, including the 14 indicators in SDG 5. But there is not enough collaboration between organizations responsible for the different SDGs to ensure that sex and gender are taken into account. The indicator for the sanitation target (SDG 6) does not include data disaggregated by sex or gender ( Nature 620 , 7; 2023 ). Unless we have this knowledge, it will be hard to track improvements in this and other SDGs.

The road to a gender-equal world is long, and women’s power and freedom to make choices is still very constrained. But the evidence from science is getting stronger: distributing power between genders creates the kind of world we all need and want to be living in.

Nature 621 , 8 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02745-9

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International Women’s Day: Gender equality benefits everyone

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The benefits of gender equality are not just for women and girls, but “for everyone whose lives will be changed by a fairer world”, the chief of UN Women said in her message for International Women’s Day ( IWD ) at UN Headquarters on Friday, being celebrated in New York, ahead of the official day.

As a “massive year for gender equality”, Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said 2020 was all about “ Generation Equality ”, in which “we’re mobilizing to realize women’s rights, and to mark 25 years of implementing the Beijing Platform for Action ” – the historic and landmark gender equality plan drawn up in the Chinese capital. 

Generation Equality is focussing on issues facing women across generations, with young women and girls at the centre. 

“We don’t have an equal world at the moment and women are angry and concerned about the future”, she said. “They are radically impatient for change. It's an impatience that runs deep, and it has been brewing for years”.

Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka underscored that girls are disappointed with “the stewardship of our planet, the unabated violence directed against them and the slow pace of change in fulcrum issues like education”.

“My greatest impatience is with unmoving economic inequality”, calling it “a driver of repeating poverty”.

She asserted that policies are needed that promote equality in childcare responsibilities and provide State support to families, and those who work in the informal economy.

Though “radically impatient”, Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka said: “We are not giving up”.

She cited as cause for hope, growing support in tackling gender-bias barriers; a “driving will” for change across generations and countries; and that the last 25 years “have shown us what is needed to accelerate action for equality”.

‘Just women’

Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee drew loud applause from delegates at the General Assembly hall celebration. Having worked with former child soldiers in Liberia, she shared a conversation she had had with a 14-year-old amputee who had been nine when he was recruited.

In a stark revelation of how women are sometimes viewed, he admitted to having committed rape many times saying, “isn’t that what women were made for”?

The activist also explained how the term “just women”, is used to “underrate and undervalue the work of women” and downplay their significance “on a daily basis”.

“We can’t even begin to have conversations about our human security needs because our values have been taken away”, she underscored.

“‘Just women’ shuts the door firmly on any idea or intention to have a conversation about equality”, but the conversation must be held, she underscored.

Ms. Gbowee stressed that in our unjust and unequal world, gender equality must be more than just numbers, spelling out: “Equality is linked to our collective humanity…to peace and justice”.

She maintained that women’s right require actionable, radical transformation through political will, financial resources and ownership.

In closing, the passionate activist urged women to “reclaim the spaces” they have lost.

“It is time for us to own our issues, we must own our agenda, we must own our narrative…the struggle for equality is a long way ahead, but with young women on our side, we can surely win”, concluded Ms. Gbowee.

Women on the front lines

Taking the podium, the youngest female Prime Minister in the world, Finland's Sanna Marin said that her country promotes gender equality as a cornerstone of society.

Turning to inequalities in the labour market, she maintained that “the digital gender cap poses a serious threat to the continued advancement of women and girls”. And the only way to change this is “to get more girls coding, more women into tech, and more women into office where they can exert influence.

In support of all women and girls’ rights, she said “I will not walk back on the progress we have made…and I will push back on anyone who claims that women do not need to be present in government changes and boardrooms”.

Armed with conviction

Inspired by climate activist Greta Thunberg, 14-year-old Alexandria Villaseñor has staged a climate strike every Friday – for the past 65 weeks.

She said the wildfires engulfing her native California were a catalyst, noting that women are leading the climate movement and “creating the solutions we need for the climate crisis”.

Meanwhile, the Chair of the Commission on the Status of Women, Mher Margaryan, said: “Our world will never be at peace so long as gender equality and an exchange of basic human rights between men and women are regarded as privilege and luxury”.

Trailblazing women warriors

Secretary-General António Guterres bemoaned that 25 years after the Beijing conference, progress on women’s rights has stalled and even reversed.

“Some countries have rolled back laws that protect women from violence; others are reducing civic space; still others are pursuing economic and immigration policies that indirectly discriminate against women”, he said , adding that “bias against gender equality is growing in some countries”.

“I am a proud feminist”, avowed the UN chief.  “Only through the equal participation of women can we benefit from the intelligence, experience and insights of all of humanity”.

He spoke at length about unsung women heroes, such as American scientist Eunice Foote who proved that changes in carbon dioxide could affect the Earth’s temperature and Tu Youyou, who saved millions of lives around by turning to traditional Chinese medicine for a cure for malaria.

“It is more important than ever for men to stand up for women’s rights and gender equality”, said Mr. Guterres, which is why he is “personally committed” to increasing support for women’s rights “across the board” at the UN.

Over the next two years, he vowed to do everything in his power “to make sure women are represented in all decision-making at the United Nations, including in peace processes”.

General Assembly President Tijjani Muhammad-Bande called on everyone, to defend gender equality as “a necessity in upholding human rights”.

Noting that no country has achieved gender parity, he stated, “we have much work to do”.

As we enter the Decade of Action to implement the Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs ), the Assembly president flagged the need to mainstream SDG 5 – Gender Equality – across all of our work.

“This ensures that women and girls have the opportunity to participate equally in all decisions”, he explained.

And in commemorating ten years of the UN Women entity, he called for support to ‘Generation Equality’ “to guarantee that equality becomes a lived experience for everyone, regardless of gender”.

“By working together…we can galvanize multilateral action to realize the human rights of all women and girls”, he affirmed.

The Celebration

The day also included what was billed as an Intergenerational Fireside Chat in which the head of UN Women, Ms. Gbowee and Ms. Villaseñor were joined by 18-year old fashion model, Aaron Philip, and feminist author and organizer Charlotte Bunch, to discuss women-related issues.

And it was capped by musical performances from UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and Grammy Award winner, Angélique Kidjo, and other singers.

Elsewhere, hundreds of events had been mobilized to demand progress on closing the gender gap in countries worldwide. A global comic and cartoon competition, around the theme Beijing+25 and Generation Equality was launched in partnership with Belgium, France, Mexico and the European Commission, calling on the younger generation to envision how they see gender equality.

• GENDER EQUALITY
• Women's empowerment
• UN International Days

Girls and Women

Gender equality is fundamental to the achievement of human rights and is an aspiration that benefits all of society, including girls and women. The universal advantages of gender equality have been well-documented, and several international frameworks have affirmed its centrality to human rights and sustainable development. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action , for example, unanimously adopted by 189 countries in 1995 and still the strongest global consensus for advancing and protecting girls’ and women’s equality and justice, recognizes that persistent inequalities pose “serious consequences for the well-being of all people.”

Yet, despite the promise of equality, progress towards it has been slow, fragile, incremental, and reversible – and dramatically undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, in every region of the world, girls and women are still more likely to be poor, illiterate, hungry, unhealthy, underrepresented in leadership positions, legally constrained, politically marginalized, and endangered by violence.

Take a Stand for Gender Equality

#EQUALEVERYWHERE

We won’t stop until girls and women are equal everywhere. Join UN Foundation, partners, and people around the world in the push for faster, lasting progress on gender equality.

UN & Civil Society Engagement

The Girls & Women Strategy team at the UN Foundation engages with the UN and civil society to ensure that gender equality remains a top priority of the UN agenda.

Ending gender-based violence

In partnership with the Spotlight Initiative, the UN Foundation has established a funding vehicle — the WithHer Fund — which provides resources directly to grassroots women’s organizations around the world working to end gender-based violence in their local communities.

Leveling the law

The UN Foundation is working with partners, like the World Bank, to improve knowledge about discriminatory laws that impede progress for girls and women and advocate for laws that protect the rights of girls and women in every aspect of their lives.

private sector action

We convene a group of high-level corporate leaders to gather in common cause and share their approaches to gender equity and equality at work, discuss best practices and lessons learned, and promote five key policy asks to achieve gender equality in the workplace.

The UN Foundation is dedicated to achieving equality everywhere. With our broad set of programs, we defend the rights and inclusion of girls and women by improving the quality, availability, and use of gender data ; support the rights of girls and women to decide when, and how many children to have; protect and strengthen the largest source of funding for global sexual and reproductive health and rights , including women’s empowerment in global supply chains; develop global girl leaders and advocates; facilitate convergent and comprehensive service delivery for girls and women; enable the benefits of clean cooking  and connect women heads of state and government .

By harnessing the power of our comprehensive portfolio, our diverse and committed partners, and our founding commitment to work with and for the UN, we’re pushing for accelerated progress toward SDG 5 and all the SDGs, to realize a world that is better and fairer for all people.

ALLIANCES AND INITIATIVES

Michelle Milford Morse

VICE PRESIDENT FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN STRATEGY

[email protected]

Sia Nowrojee

ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, GIRLS AND WOMEN STRATEGY

[email protected]

Gabriela Carbó Zack

SENIOR ASSOCIATE, GIRLS AND WOMEN STRATEGY

[email protected]

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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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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).

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Worldwide Optimism About Future of Gender Equality, Even as Many See Advantages for Men

Sizable shares say men have more opportunities for high-paying jobs, should have preferential treatment when jobs are scarce, table of contents.

• Widespread support for equal rights for men and women
• People in most countries are optimistic about the future of gender equality
• Majorities in many African, Middle Eastern and Asian-Pacific publics say men should have preferential treatment when jobs are scarce
• Across the globe, many believe men in their country have a better life than women
• Men generally seen as having more opportunities than women for high-paying jobs
• Many say men have more opportunities than women to be leaders in their community
• Publics see more gender parity when it comes to people’s opportunities to express their political views and to get a good education
• Many say men have more influence than women when it comes to making important decisions about household finances
• Larger shares say women have more influence when it comes to how to raise children than say men do
• People generally think men and women have about the same influence when it comes to decisions about their family’s religious practices
• In nearly all countries surveyed, majorities prefer an egalitarian marriage
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

This report explores cross-national perceptions of gender equality, including the opportunities available to men and women and the power they wield in family decisions. It also examines expectations for the future of gender equality across countries.

For this report, we used data from a survey conducted across 34 countries from May 13 to Oct. 2, 2019, totaling 38,426 respondents. The surveys were conducted face-to-face across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and on the phone in United States and Canada. In the Asia-Pacific region, face-to-face surveys were conducted in India, Indonesia and the Philippines, while phone surveys were administered in Australia, Japan and South Korea. Across Europe, the survey was conducted over the phone in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK, but face-to-face in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.

Here are the  questions  used for the report, along with responses, and the survey  methodology .

Twenty-five years after the United Nations’ Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action pledged to take the necessary steps to “remove all obstacles to gender equality and the advancement and empowerment of women,” support for gender equality is strong around the globe. Across 34 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 94% think it is important for women in their country to have the same rights as men, with 74% saying this is very important.

In many countries, women place more importance on gender equality than men do. However, women are less optimistic than men that women in their countries will achieve equality in the future, and they are more likely to say men have better lives than women.

While publics around the world embrace the idea of gender equality, at least four-in-ten think men generally have more opportunities than women in their country when it comes to getting high-paying jobs (a median of 54% across the 34 countries surveyed) and being leaders in their community (44%). Publics see more equity in access to a good education – a median of 81% believe men and women in their country generally have the same opportunities in this area – and expressing their political views (63% say men and women have the same opportunities). No more than 6% say women have more opportunities than men in any of these realms.

Majorities in most European countries surveyed, as well as in Japan, South Korea, Israel, Australia, Canada and the United States, say men in their country have more opportunities than women when it comes to getting high-paying jobs. When it comes to being leaders in their communities, more than half in Nigeria, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Italy, Tunisia, Greece, France and Slovakia think men in their country have more opportunities than women.

Despite widespread support for gender equality around the world, a notable share (a median of 40% across the countries surveyed) thinks men should have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce; 56% disagree with this notion. In some countries, men are more likely than women to say men should have preferential treatment when jobs are scarce, with double-digit gender differences in Kenya, Nigeria, Bulgaria, South Africa, Israel, Slovakia, Italy, Argentina and the Czech Republic.

When asked who has a better life in their country, a 46% median across the 34 countries surveyed say men do, while 15% point to women and 31% volunteer that neither men nor women have a better life. Majorities in France, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Canada, the U.S., Turkey, Australia and the Netherlands think men have a better life than women in their country. Tunisia is the only country surveyed where more say women have a better life than say men do, although similar shares say women have a better life as say both men and women enjoy the same quality of life.

In most of the 34 countries surveyed, women are more likely than men to say men have a better life in their country. Gender differences are particularly large on this question in Greece (women are 27 percentage points more likely to say this), Slovakia (25 points), Italy (25), Canada (20), Brazil (20), Hungary (19) and Turkey (18).

The shares saying that men have a better life than women in their country have increased considerably since 2010 in many of the countries where trends are available – possibly as a result of increased awareness of gender issues spurred by the #MeToo Movement – with differences of at least 20 percentage points in Turkey, the UK, South Korea and Japan. Poland is the only country surveyed in both years where a smaller share now says men have a better life than did so in 2010.

Despite seeing some advantages for men, most people express optimism about the future of gender equality in their country. A median of 75% across the 34 countries surveyed think it is likely that women in their country will eventually have the same rights as men, and 5% volunteer that women in their country have already achieved equality.

Men tend to be more optimistic than women about prospects for gender equality, with gender differences of at least 10 percentage points in 10 countries and smaller but significant differences in 11 others. For example, 77% of men in Japan – compared with 58% of women – say it’s likely that women in their country will eventually attain or already have the same rights as men. Nigeria and the Philippines are the only countries surveyed where a larger share of women than men are optimistic about gender equality.

When it comes to family life, the sense is that men and women have about the same influence in making important decisions in their households. A 34-country median of 55% say both have roughly equal influence when it comes to important decisions about household finances, 56% say this about how to raise children and 62% say this of decisions about a family’s religious practices. To the extent that people see a difference, however, men are generally seen as having more of an influence than women when it comes to decisions about household finances, while women are generally seen as having more influence when it comes to decisions about raising children.

In nearly every country surveyed, majorities say that a marriage where both the husband and wife have jobs and take care of the home is more satisfying than one where the husband provides for the family and the wife takes care of the house and children. Even so, sizable shares in many countries say a more traditional marriage would be preferable, including about four-in-ten in India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Turkey and Tunisia.

These are among the major findings from a Pew Research Center survey conducted among 38,426 people in 34 countries from May 13 to Oct. 2, 2019.

Most people agree it is important for women to have the same rights as men in their country. Across the 34 countries surveyed, a median of 94% hold this view, including nearly all in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, the U.S., Canada, Germany, Greece, Spain, Australia, Argentina, the UK and Hungary.

In addition, majorities in 30 nations say it is very important that men and women have the same rights in their country. The share who endorse this stronger sentiment varies across countries, however.

In Sweden, the most egalitarian country included in the survey based on indices from the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Development Program , 96% believe gender equality is very important. By comparison, substantially smaller shares hold this view in Tunisia (44%) and Nigeria (43%), two countries with relatively higher levels of gender inequality. Strong support for gender equality is also relatively less common in Kenya, Russia, South Korea and Ukraine.

Within each country, views of equality often differ by gender. In 20 nations, women are more likely than men to say gender equality is very important. This gender difference is largest in Kenya and Nigeria, where relatively small shares overall view equal rights as very important. More than half of women in Nigeria (54%) think gender equality is very important, compared with only 31% of men. And while 64% of Kenyan women say gender equality is very important, just 40% of Kenyan men express the same view. In many countries where overwhelming majorities endorse equality, men and women do not differ in their views.

The U.S. is the only country where men are more likely than women to say it is very important for men and women to have the same rights. But while the difference is statistically significant, it is fairly small: 93% of men hold this view, compared with 89% of women.

Educational attainment is also related to views of gender equality. In 26 countries, those with more education are more likely than those with less to believe it is very important for women to have the same rights as men. 1 The largest differences are in Lithuania and the Czech Republic. Three-quarters or more of those with more education in Lithuania (76%) and the Czech Republic (87%) hold this view, compared with 54% of Lithuanians and 66% of Czechs with less education. There are also educational differences of 10 percentage points or more in Italy, Bulgaria, South Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Ukraine, Spain, Poland and Nigeria.

In addition to viewing gender equality as important, most people are optimistic that women will eventually have the same rights as men in their country. Majorities in 30 of the 34 countries surveyed hold this view, including roughly 90% in the Netherlands, India, the Philippines and Mexico.

In the U.S., 75% believe gender equality is likely. An additional 14% volunteer the response that women already have the same rights as men. One-in-ten or more in most Central and Eastern European nations, as well as Ukraine, Greece, Italy, Russia, Israel and Tunisia, agree that women and men already have equal rights.

Despite widespread optimism globally, substantive shares in some of the countries surveyed say it is unlikely that women will eventually have the same rights as men in their country. About a quarter or more in Nigeria, Japan, Kenya,Turkey, Israel, Tunisia, Spain and Hungary are pessimistic about the prospects for gender equality in their country.

Across many countries, women are less optimistic than men about the likelihood of attaining gender equality. For example, 77% of men in Japan think either men and women already have equal rights or that it is likely they will in the future, compared with 58% of Japanese women. Similar gender differences can be found in 20 other countries, including roughly 15 percentage point differences in Spain, South Korea, France, Italy and Brazil.

Nigeria and the Philippines are the only publics that show the opposite pattern: Larger shares of women than men say gender equality is likely. Half of men in Nigeria express this view, compared with 68% of women.

Across the 34 countries surveyed, a median of 56% disagree with the notion that men should have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce; 40% agree that men should receive preferential treatment in this situation.

In nearly all North American, Western European and Latin American countries surveyed – as well as in Australia, Lithuania, Hungary, Israel, the Czech Republic and Japan – majorities reject the idea that men should have more right to a job than women in tough economic times, as do pluralities in Poland and Bulgaria. This is particularly the case in Sweden, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, the U.S., the UK, Australia, France and Germany, where roughly eight-in-ten or more disagree that men deserve preferential treatment when jobs are scarce.

In contrast, majorities in the African countries surveyed, as well as in India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Turkey and Lebanon, agree that men should have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce. Roughly eight-in-ten say this in Tunisia and India.

Views on this remain virtually unchanged in most of the countries where the question has been previously asked (most recently in 2012 in Lebanon, Turkey and Tunisia and in 2010 in 15 other countries). Publics are now more likely to agree that men should have preferential treatment when jobs are scarce in Kenya (12 percentage points higher), Lebanon (+11 points) and Mexico (+11 points). Meanwhile, the shares saying men should have more right to a job in tough economic times have dropped in South Korea (8 percentage points less likely), Nigeria (-7 points) and Argentina (-6 points).

Across 30 of the 34 countries surveyed, those with less education are more likely to believe men should have more right to a job than women when jobs are scarce. For example, majorities of six-in-ten or more among those with less education in Turkey, Lebanon, Kenya, Slovakia, South Africa and South Korea agree, compared with roughly half or fewer of those with more education in these countries.

Income is also related to views on this. In most countries surveyed, those with lower incomes – equivalent to the median for their country or less – are more likely than those with higher incomes to say men should have more right to a job during tough economic times. In the U.S., Australia and much of Western Europe, those with lower incomes are at least twice as likely as those with higher incomes to believe men should receive preferential treatment when jobs are scarce. Still, only about a quarter or fewer across income groups in each of these countries say this.

In some countries, men are more likely than women to agree that men deserve preferential treatment when jobs are scarce, with double-digit differences in Kenya, Nigeria, Bulgaria, South Africa, Israel, Slovakia, Italy, Argentina and the Czech Republic.

There are also double-digit differences between the oldest and youngest age groups in South Korea, Brazil, Italy, Greece, Argentina, Poland, Lebanon, the Philippines, Israel, Australia, France and Spain: In each of these countries, adults ages 50 and older are more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to agree that men should have more right to a job during tough economic times.

Though many people expect that their country will become more egalitarian in time, a median of 46% across the 34 countries surveyed say that, all things considered, men have a better life than women in their country.

Majorities in France, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Canada, the U.S., Turkey, Australia and the Netherlands say men have a better life than women in their country. Pluralities in many other countries express the same view.

The volunteered response that neither gender has a better life than the other is common in many countries, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Roughly half or more provide this response in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania.

A third or more in Tunisia, Kenya, South Korea and South Africa believe, all things considered, women have a better life than men. Tunisia is the only country surveyed where a larger share say women are better off (37%) than say men are (24%).

This question was last asked in a subset of countries in 2010. In many of these countries, the share who believe men have a better life than women has increased substantially. The largest change is in Turkey. Roughly one-third of people in Turkey said men had a better life than women in 2010, compared with 57% in 2019.

Increases of roughly 20 percentage points or more can also be seen in the UK, South Korea, Japan, Spain, Indonesia and the U.S. Smaller increases can be seen in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Kenya. Poland is the only country where this share has decreased since 2010, from 55% to 35% in 2019.

As with other questions related to gender equality, men and women tend to hold different views. In 23 of the 34 countries surveyed, women are more likely than men to believe that men have a better life in their country. In Greece, almost half of women hold this view, compared with only 20% of men. Differences of 20 percentage points or more can also be seen in Slovakia, Italy, Canada and Brazil.

Nigeria stands out again for showing the opposite pattern. Men (51%) are more likely than women (42%) to say that men are better off in their country. Indonesia shows a similar pattern.

Majorities or pluralities in 22 of the 34 countries surveyed say men generally have more opportunities for high-paying jobs than women, including about two-thirds or more in Sweden, France, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Spain, the UK, Australia and Canada. More than four-in-ten in Greece, Nigeria, Russia, Lebanon and Argentina also think men in their country have more opportunities when it comes to getting high-paying jobs, but similar shares think opportunities are generally the same for men and women.

In the Philippines, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Kenya and Mexico, majorities say men and women have similar opportunities when it comes to getting high-paying jobs; half in Tunisia share this view.

Across most of the countries surveyed, women are significantly more likely than men to say men in their country have more opportunities when it comes to getting high-paying jobs. About two-thirds of women in the U.S. (66%) believe men in their country have more opportunities for high-paying jobs, compared with about half of men in the U.S. (53%). And while majorities of men and women in Canada say men have more opportunities in this area, women are far more likely to say this is the case (77% vs. 55%, respectively). This pattern is evident in nearly every European country surveyed (Greece and Lithuania are the exception), as well as in Australia, Ukraine, Brazil, South Korea, Russia, Argentina and Japan.

When it comes to opportunities to be leaders in their community, majorities in Nigeria, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Italy, Tunisia, Greece and France say men in their country have more opportunities than women; about half in Slovakia say the same.

Even in many countries where majorities or pluralities believe men and women in their country generally have the same opportunities to be leaders in their community, sizable shares say men have more opportunities than women. For example, about four-in-ten or more in Spain, Canada, the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, India, Russia and Australia say this is the case in their country.

For the most part, men and women offer similar views on this. But to the extent that there is a difference, women tend to be more likely than men to see an advantage for men in getting opportunities to be leaders in their community. The exception is Kenya, where men (53%) are more likely than women (43%) to say men have more opportunities to be leaders in their community.

In 30 of the 34 countries surveyed, majorities or pluralities think men and women in their country have about the same opportunities when it comes to expressing their political views. About half in Japan also believe this, but an identical share says men have more opportunities than women.

More than six-in-ten Nigerians (64%) say men in their country have more opportunities than women when it comes to expressing their political views, as do 55% in South Korea and 53% in Turkey. Even in countries where majorities or pluralities believe men and women have about the same opportunities in this area, the shares saying men have more opportunities than women exceed the shares saying women have more opportunities by at least 10 percentage points.

Opinions on this generally do not vary significantly by gender, but in nine countries, women are far more likely than men to say men in their country have more opportunities to express their political views. For example, in South Korea, a majority of women (60%) think men in their country have more opportunities to express their political views, compared with 49% of South Korean men.

Gender gaps are also evident in the Netherlands (41% of women vs. 28% of men say men have more opportunities), Australia (36% vs. 23%), Spain (34% vs. 21%), Canada (34% vs. 23%), France (45% vs. 35%), the UK (36% vs. 27%), the U.S. (36% vs. 28%) and the Czech Republic (24% vs. 17%).

Kenya is the only country surveyed where men are more likely than women to say men in their country have more opportunities to express their political views. More than four-in-ten Kenyan men (45%) say this, compared with 35% of Kenyan women.

When it comes to getting a good education, majorities in all but one country surveyed – ranging from 64% in Brazil to 91% in Greece – say men and women in their country have about the same opportunities. About half say the same in Turkey.

One-third of the public in Turkey and about one-in-five in Nigeria, Israel, France, Slovakia, Brazil, Japan and South Korea think men in their country have more opportunities than women when it comes to getting a good education; smaller shares in these countries think women have more opportunities than men.

Tunisia is the only country surveyed where a significantly larger share says women have more opportunities than men to get a good education than say men have more opportunities than women. About a quarter of Tunisians (24%) see women as having more opportunities in this area, compared with 6% who say men do; 70% believe men and women have about the same opportunities to get a good education.

With the exception of Turkey, majorities of men and women across the countries surveyed believe both genders have about the same opportunities when it comes to getting a good education. And for the most part, differences in how men and women see this are modest at best.

Across the 34 countries surveyed, a median of 55% say that, in a family, men and women have about the same influence when it comes to making important decisions about household finances; 23% say men generally have more influence and 15% say women do.

To the extent that people see one gender having more influence when it comes to making important decisions about household finances, men are generally seen as having more influence than women. In 16 of the 34 countries surveyed, more say men have more influence than say women do by a margin of at least 10 percentage points. The gap is particularly wide in Nigeria, where 61% say men generally have more influence in this area (compared with 10% who say women do), Turkey (54% vs. 11%), Israel (44% vs. 11%), Lebanon (40% vs. 10%) and Sweden (37% vs. 9%). In each of these countries, people are at least four times as likely to say men have more influence as they are to say women do.

Among European publics, majorities or pluralities in 12 of 14 countries surveyed say men and women generally have about the same influence in making important decisions about household finances. The only two European countries surveyed where this is not the case are Lithuania and Slovakia, where similar or equal shares say both genders have about the same influence as say men have more influence in this area.

Majorities in the three Latin American countries surveyed – Mexico, Argentina and Brazil – say men and women have about the same influence in making important decisions about household finances. This is also the case in the Philippines, Canada, the U.S., Australia, Indonesia and South Africa.

Japan is the only country where the share saying women have more influence when it comes to making important decisions about household finances is significantly larger than the share saying men do (29% vs. 16%). Still, 54% in Japan say men and women generally have about the same influence.

In most of the countries surveyed, men and women have similar views on this question, but where differences emerge, men are typically more likely than women to say men in their country have more influence when it comes to important decisions about household finances, while women are more likely to say either women do or that both are about equal. For example, 61% of men in Turkey (vs. 48% of women) say men in their country have more influence than women. The UK is the only country surveyed where women are more likely than men to say men have more influence when it comes to making important decisions about household finances.

When it comes to who in a family has more influence when it comes to making important decisions about how to raise children, a median of 56% across the 34 countries surveyed say men and women have about the same influence; 39% say women have more influence and just 6% say men do.

Majorities in 18 of the 34 countries surveyed say that, in a family, men and women have about the same influence when it comes to making important decisions about how to raise children. Still, in nearly every country, far larger shares say women have more influence in this area than say men do. And in seven of the 34 countries – Lithuania, Greece, Lebanon, Slovakia, Israel, the Czech Republic and Turkey – majorities or pluralities say women in their country have more influence than men in making important decisions about raising children.

Men and women generally agree in their assessments of who has more influence when it comes to decisions about how to raise children, but there are exceptions. For example, in Brazil, women (43%) are more likely than men (34%) to say women in their country have more influence in making important decisions in this area; in turn, Brazilian men (61%) are more likely then Brazilian women (52%) to say both have about the same influence.

Across the 34 countries surveyed, a median of 62% say that, in a family, men and women generally have about the same influence when it comes to making important decisions about their family’s religious practices; 18% say women have more influence, while 14% say men do.

Across most of the countries surveyed, majorities or pluralities say men and women have about the same influence when it comes to making important decisions about their family’s religious practices. There are a few exceptions to this pattern. In Sweden, Israel and Nigeria, similar shares say men and women have about the same influence as say men have more influence than women in this area. And in Lithuania, 37% say men and women have the same influence and 41% say women have more influence.

In Israel, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, men are more likely than women to say that men in their country have more influence when it comes to making important decisions about their family’s religious practices. About half of men in Israel (51%) and Nigeria (49%) say this, compared with 38% of Israeli women and 36% of Nigerian women. And while about three-in-ten South African (28%) and Kenyan (31%) men say men in their country have more influence over important decisions about their family’s religious practices, two-in-ten women in each of those countries say the same.

In turn, women in Brazil, South Korea, Nigeria, Russia, France and Lebanon are more likely than their male counterparts to say women have more influence in making important decisions about their family’s religious practices. The gender difference is largest in Brazil, where 42% of women – vs. 29% of men – hold this view.

A median of 72% across the 34 countries surveyed say a marriage where both the husband and wife have jobs and take care of the house and children is a more satisfying way of life than one where the husband provides for the family and the wife takes care of the house and children. The shares saying that a more egalitarian marriage is better are lowest in Lithuania, Tunisia and Indonesia.

Publics in Sweden, France and Spain are the most likely to say an egalitarian marriage is preferable to one where the husband provides for the family and the wife takes care of the house and children. This view is also widespread in Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Kenya, Bulgaria, the UK, South Korea, Italy and Argentina, where at least three-quarters say the same.

In Tunisia and Indonesia, views on the more satisfying type of marriage are split. About half in each country prefer a marriage where the husband and wife both have jobs and take care of the house, while similar shares prefer a marriage with more traditional gender roles.

Even in some countries where majorities or pluralities prefer an egalitarian marriage, substantial shares say a marriage where the husband provides for the family and the wife takes care of the house and family would be more satisfying. For example, a third or more in India, Lebanon, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Nigeria and Lithuania say a more traditional marriage would be preferable.

Views on this vary somewhat by gender, but the differences tend to be relatively small, even in some countries where they are statistically different. In Poland, Turkey and Argentina, women are more likely than men to prefer an egalitarian marriage by a double-digit margin (10 percentage points in Poland, 11 points in Turkey and 12 points in Argentina).

Opinions vary more widely across educational attainment. Those with more education more likely to prefer a marriage where both the husband and wife have jobs and take care of the house and children in most of the countries surveyed. In fact, in 17 countries, those with more education are more likely to say this by 10 or more points, including difference of at least 20 points in Turkey (25 points more likely), Lebanon (21 points) and Brazil (20 points).

Age is also linked to views on what type of marriage is preferable in about half of the countries surveyed, with people younger than 30 more likely than those ages 50 and older to say a marriage where both the husband and wife have jobs and take care of the house and children is the more satisfying way of life. The difference is particularly pronounced in Lithuania, where 71% of those younger than 30 prefer an egalitarian marriage, compared with 43% of those ages 50 and older. There are also double-digit age differences in the U.S., Canada, Italy, the UK, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Australia, South Korea, Lebanon, Tunisia, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

Preference for an egalitarian marriage has increased in three of the 16 countries where this question was also asked in 2010 (by 11 percentage points in South Korea, 8 points in Argentina and 6 points in Nigeria). In contrast, smaller shares now see an egalitarian marriage as preferable in Turkey, Indonesia, Russia and Germany. The steepest decline is in Turkey. About six-in-ten (57%) now say a marriage where both the husband and wife have jobs and take care of the house and children is the more satisfying way of life, compared with 72% a decade ago.

• For the purpose of comparing educational groups across countries, we standardize education levels based on the UN’s International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED). The lower education category is below secondary education and the higher category is secondary or above in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, South Africa, Tunisia and Ukraine. In all other countries, the lower education category is secondary education or below and the higher category is postsecondary or above. ↩

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Gender equality and women’s empowerment

Related sdgs, achieve gender equality and empower all women ....

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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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• 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'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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The overturning of Roe v. Wade has heightened awareness of some of the broader issues the feminist movement and other allies for women’s rights have long championed, particularly advancing gender equality and economic well-being in societies around the globe.

Stanford scholars have studied some of the difficulties of reaching those goals and the many obstacles women face, whether it is at work, in the classroom and education, or as leaders. They have examined how gendered biases are perpetuated, why gender diversity and inclusion are imperative, and what can lead to prejudiced attitudes, assumptions, and adversities ultimately changing.

From the fields of business, social sciences, the humanities, law, education, health, and medicine, here are what Stanford researchers have to say about the evolution of women’s rights and the obstacles to advancing gender equity.

Impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade , and the U.S. Supreme Court

The decision by the U.S Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case will carry many wide-reaching and serious consequences for women, say Stanford professors. By ending the constitutional right to abortion, a protection women have had for nearly 50 years, it will now be up to states to decide what reproductive choices are available for women – regardless of the circumstance. 

“No matter the reason a woman seeks to terminate a pregnancy – including because her health is jeopardized, because she was raped, because the fetus has a condition making death likely shortly after birth – a majority of state legislators may usurp that deeply personal decision,” said Stanford law Professor Jane S. Schacter in the wake of the decision. 

Here, Stanford professors shed light on the ramifications the reversal will have, as well as research on the divergence between the justices’ positioning versus public opinion, which the Roe v. Wade overruling highlighted.

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Over the coming months, it will be increasingly clear what the ramifications of both the end of Roe v. Wade and the pandemic will have. But what is already apparent is the urgent need to ensure access to health care, child care, and education, Stanford scholars say. Here is some of that research.

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“Integrating sex and gender as variables in research, where relevant, enhances excellence in science and engineering,” said Schiebinger , who is the John L. Hinds Professor in the History of Science in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “The operative question is how can we harness the creative power of sex and gender analysis for discovery and innovation? Does considering gender add a valuable dimension to research? Does it take research in new directions?”  

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Twenty years of gender equality research: A scoping review based on a new semantic indicator

Paola belingheri.

1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Energia, dei Sistemi, del Territorio e delle Costruzioni, Università degli Studi di Pisa, Largo L. Lazzarino, Pisa, Italy

Filippo Chiarello

Andrea fronzetti colladon.

2 Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

3 Department of Management, Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

Paola Rovelli

4 Faculty of Economics and Management, Centre for Family Business Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Associated Data

All relevant data are within the manuscript and its supporting information files. The only exception is the text of the abstracts (over 15,000) that we have downloaded from Scopus. These abstracts can be retrieved from Scopus, but we do not have permission to redistribute them.

Gender equality is a major problem that places women at a disadvantage thereby stymieing economic growth and societal advancement. In the last two decades, extensive research has been conducted on gender related issues, studying both their antecedents and consequences. However, existing literature reviews fail to provide a comprehensive and clear picture of what has been studied so far, which could guide scholars in their future research. Our paper offers a scoping review of a large portion of the research that has been published over the last 22 years, on gender equality and related issues, with a specific focus on business and economics studies. Combining innovative methods drawn from both network analysis and text mining, we provide a synthesis of 15,465 scientific articles. We identify 27 main research topics, we measure their relevance from a semantic point of view and the relationships among them, highlighting the importance of each topic in the overall gender discourse. We find that prominent research topics mostly relate to women in the workforce–e.g., concerning compensation, role, education, decision-making and career progression. However, some of them are losing momentum, and some other research trends–for example related to female entrepreneurship, leadership and participation in the board of directors–are on the rise. Besides introducing a novel methodology to review broad literature streams, our paper offers a map of the main gender-research trends and presents the most popular and the emerging themes, as well as their intersections, outlining important avenues for future research.

Introduction

The persistent gender inequalities that currently exist across the developed and developing world are receiving increasing attention from economists, policymakers, and the general public [e.g., 1 – 3 ]. Economic studies have indicated that women’s education and entry into the workforce contributes to social and economic well-being [e.g., 4 , 5 ], while their exclusion from the labor market and from managerial positions has an impact on overall labor productivity and income per capita [ 6 , 7 ]. The United Nations selected gender equality, with an emphasis on female education, as part of the Millennium Development Goals [ 8 ], and gender equality at-large as one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030 [ 9 ]. These latter objectives involve not only developing nations, but rather all countries, to achieve economic, social and environmental well-being.

As is the case with many SDGs, gender equality is still far from being achieved and persists across education, access to opportunities, or presence in decision-making positions [ 7 , 10 , 11 ]. As we enter the last decade for the SDGs’ implementation, and while we are battling a global health pandemic, effective and efficient action becomes paramount to reach this ambitious goal.

Scholars have dedicated a massive effort towards understanding gender equality, its determinants, its consequences for women and society, and the appropriate actions and policies to advance women’s equality. Many topics have been covered, ranging from women’s education and human capital [ 12 , 13 ] and their role in society [e.g., 14 , 15 ], to their appointment in firms’ top ranked positions [e.g., 16 , 17 ] and performance implications [e.g., 18 , 19 ]. Despite some attempts, extant literature reviews provide a narrow view on these issues, restricted to specific topics–e.g., female students’ presence in STEM fields [ 20 ], educational gender inequality [ 5 ], the gender pay gap [ 21 ], the glass ceiling effect [ 22 ], leadership [ 23 ], entrepreneurship [ 24 ], women’s presence on the board of directors [ 25 , 26 ], diversity management [ 27 ], gender stereotypes in advertisement [ 28 ], or specific professions [ 29 ]. A comprehensive view on gender-related research, taking stock of key findings and under-studied topics is thus lacking.

Extant literature has also highlighted that gender issues, and their economic and social ramifications, are complex topics that involve a large number of possible antecedents and outcomes [ 7 ]. Indeed, gender equality actions are most effective when implemented in unison with other SDGs (e.g., with SDG 8, see [ 30 ]) in a synergetic perspective [ 10 ]. Many bodies of literature (e.g., business, economics, development studies, sociology and psychology) approach the problem of achieving gender equality from different perspectives–often addressing specific and narrow aspects. This sometimes leads to a lack of clarity about how different issues, circumstances, and solutions may be related in precipitating or mitigating gender inequality or its effects. As the number of papers grows at an increasing pace, this issue is exacerbated and there is a need to step back and survey the body of gender equality literature as a whole. There is also a need to examine synergies between different topics and approaches, as well as gaps in our understanding of how different problems and solutions work together. Considering the important topic of women’s economic and social empowerment, this paper aims to fill this gap by answering the following research question: what are the most relevant findings in the literature on gender equality and how do they relate to each other ?

To do so, we conduct a scoping review [ 31 ], providing a synthesis of 15,465 articles dealing with gender equity related issues published in the last twenty-two years, covering both the periods of the MDGs and the SDGs (i.e., 2000 to mid 2021) in all the journals indexed in the Academic Journal Guide’s 2018 ranking of business and economics journals. Given the huge amount of research conducted on the topic, we adopt an innovative methodology, which relies on social network analysis and text mining. These techniques are increasingly adopted when surveying large bodies of text. Recently, they were applied to perform analysis of online gender communication differences [ 32 ] and gender behaviors in online technology communities [ 33 ], to identify and classify sexual harassment instances in academia [ 34 ], and to evaluate the gender inclusivity of disaster management policies [ 35 ].

Applied to the title, abstracts and keywords of the articles in our sample, this methodology allows us to identify a set of 27 recurrent topics within which we automatically classify the papers. Introducing additional novelty, by means of the Semantic Brand Score (SBS) indicator [ 36 ] and the SBS BI app [ 37 ], we assess the importance of each topic in the overall gender equality discourse and its relationships with the other topics, as well as trends over time, with a more accurate description than that offered by traditional literature reviews relying solely on the number of papers presented in each topic.

This methodology, applied to gender equality research spanning the past twenty-two years, enables two key contributions. First, we extract the main message that each document is conveying and how this is connected to other themes in literature, providing a rich picture of the topics that are at the center of the discourse, as well as of the emerging topics. Second, by examining the semantic relationship between topics and how tightly their discourses are linked, we can identify the key relationships and connections between different topics. This semi-automatic methodology is also highly reproducible with minimum effort.

This literature review is organized as follows. In the next section, we present how we selected relevant papers and how we analyzed them through text mining and social network analysis. We then illustrate the importance of 27 selected research topics, measured by means of the SBS indicator. In the results section, we present an overview of the literature based on the SBS results–followed by an in-depth narrative analysis of the top 10 topics (i.e., those with the highest SBS) and their connections. Subsequently, we highlight a series of under-studied connections between the topics where there is potential for future research. Through this analysis, we build a map of the main gender-research trends in the last twenty-two years–presenting the most popular themes. We conclude by highlighting key areas on which research should focused in the future.

Our aim is to map a broad topic, gender equality research, that has been approached through a host of different angles and through different disciplines. Scoping reviews are the most appropriate as they provide the freedom to map different themes and identify literature gaps, thereby guiding the recommendation of new research agendas [ 38 ].

Several practical approaches have been proposed to identify and assess the underlying topics of a specific field using big data [ 39 – 41 ], but many of them fail without proper paper retrieval and text preprocessing. This is specifically true for a research field such as the gender-related one, which comprises the work of scholars from different backgrounds. In this section, we illustrate a novel approach for the analysis of scientific (gender-related) papers that relies on methods and tools of social network analysis and text mining. Our procedure has four main steps: (1) data collection, (2) text preprocessing, (3) keywords extraction and classification, and (4) evaluation of semantic importance and image.

Data collection

In this study, we analyze 22 years of literature on gender-related research. Following established practice for scoping reviews [ 42 ], our data collection consisted of two main steps, which we summarize here below.

Firstly, we retrieved from the Scopus database all the articles written in English that contained the term “gender” in their title, abstract or keywords and were published in a journal listed in the Academic Journal Guide 2018 ranking of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) ( https://charteredabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/AJG2018-Methodology.pdf ), considering the time period from Jan 2000 to May 2021. We used this information considering that abstracts, titles and keywords represent the most informative part of a paper, while using the full-text would increase the signal-to-noise ratio for information extraction. Indeed, these textual elements already demonstrated to be reliable sources of information for the task of domain lexicon extraction [ 43 , 44 ]. We chose Scopus as source of literature because of its popularity, its update rate, and because it offers an API to ease the querying process. Indeed, while it does not allow to retrieve the full text of scientific articles, the Scopus API offers access to titles, abstracts, citation information and metadata for all its indexed scholarly journals. Moreover, we decided to focus on the journals listed in the AJG 2018 ranking because we were interested in reviewing business and economics related gender studies only. The AJG is indeed widely used by universities and business schools as a reference point for journal and research rigor and quality. This first step, executed in June 2021, returned more than 55,000 papers.

In the second step–because a look at the papers showed very sparse results, many of which were not in line with the topic of this literature review (e.g., papers dealing with health care or medical issues, where the word gender indicates the gender of the patients)–we applied further inclusion criteria to make the sample more focused on the topic of this literature review (i.e., women’s gender equality issues). Specifically, we only retained those papers mentioning, in their title and/or abstract, both gender-related keywords (e.g., daughter, female, mother) and keywords referring to bias and equality issues (e.g., equality, bias, diversity, inclusion). After text pre-processing (see next section), keywords were first identified from a frequency-weighted list of words found in the titles, abstracts and keywords in the initial list of papers, extracted through text mining (following the same approach as [ 43 ]). They were selected by two of the co-authors independently, following respectively a bottom up and a top-down approach. The bottom-up approach consisted of examining the words found in the frequency-weighted list and classifying those related to gender and equality. The top-down approach consisted in searching in the word list for notable gender and equality-related words. Table 1 reports the sets of keywords we considered, together with some examples of words that were used to search for their presence in the dataset (a full list is provided in the S1 Text ). At end of this second step, we obtained a final sample of 15,465 relevant papers.

Text processing and keyword extraction

Text preprocessing aims at structuring text into a form that can be analyzed by statistical models. In the present section, we describe the preprocessing steps we applied to paper titles and abstracts, which, as explained below, partially follow a standard text preprocessing pipeline [ 45 ]. These activities have been performed using the R package udpipe [ 46 ].

The first step is n-gram extraction (i.e., a sequence of words from a given text sample) to identify which n-grams are important in the analysis, since domain-specific lexicons are often composed by bi-grams and tri-grams [ 47 ]. Multi-word extraction is usually implemented with statistics and linguistic rules, thus using the statistical properties of n-grams or machine learning approaches [ 48 ]. However, for the present paper, we used Scopus metadata in order to have a more effective and efficient n-grams collection approach [ 49 ]. We used the keywords of each paper in order to tag n-grams with their associated keywords automatically. Using this greedy approach, it was possible to collect all the keywords listed by the authors of the papers. From this list, we extracted only keywords composed by two, three and four words, we removed all the acronyms and rare keywords (i.e., appearing in less than 1% of papers), and we clustered keywords showing a high orthographic similarity–measured using a Levenshtein distance [ 50 ] lower than 2, considering these groups of keywords as representing same concepts, but expressed with different spelling. After tagging the n-grams in the abstracts, we followed a common data preparation pipeline that consists of the following steps: (i) tokenization, that splits the text into tokens (i.e., single words and previously tagged multi-words); (ii) removal of stop-words (i.e. those words that add little meaning to the text, usually being very common and short functional words–such as “and”, “or”, or “of”); (iii) parts-of-speech tagging, that is providing information concerning the morphological role of a word and its morphosyntactic context (e.g., if the token is a determiner, the next token is a noun or an adjective with very high confidence, [ 51 ]); and (iv) lemmatization, which consists in substituting each word with its dictionary form (or lemma). The output of the latter step allows grouping together the inflected forms of a word. For example, the verbs “am”, “are”, and “is” have the shared lemma “be”, or the nouns “cat” and “cats” both share the lemma “cat”. We preferred lemmatization over stemming [ 52 ] in order to obtain more interpretable results.

In addition, we identified a further set of keywords (with respect to those listed in the “keywords” field) by applying a series of automatic words unification and removal steps, as suggested in past research [ 53 , 54 ]. We removed: sparse terms (i.e., occurring in less than 0.1% of all documents), common terms (i.e., occurring in more than 10% of all documents) and retained only nouns and adjectives. It is relevant to notice that no document was lost due to these steps. We then used the TF-IDF function [ 55 ] to produce a new list of keywords. We additionally tested other approaches for the identification and clustering of keywords–such as TextRank [ 56 ] or Latent Dirichlet Allocation [ 57 ]–without obtaining more informative results.

Classification of research topics

To guide the literature analysis, two experts met regularly to examine the sample of collected papers and to identify the main topics and trends in gender research. Initially, they conducted brainstorming sessions on the topics they expected to find, due to their knowledge of the literature. This led to an initial list of topics. Subsequently, the experts worked independently, also supported by the keywords in paper titles and abstracts extracted with the procedure described above.

Considering all this information, each expert identified and clustered relevant keywords into topics. At the end of the process, the two assignments were compared and exhibited a 92% agreement. Another meeting was held to discuss discordant cases and reach a consensus. This resulted in a list of 27 topics, briefly introduced in Table 2 and subsequently detailed in the following sections.

Evaluation of semantic importance

Working on the lemmatized corpus of the 15,465 papers included in our sample, we proceeded with the evaluation of semantic importance trends for each topic and with the analysis of their connections and prevalent textual associations. To this aim, we used the Semantic Brand Score indicator [ 36 ], calculated through the SBS BI webapp [ 37 ] that also produced a brand image report for each topic. For this study we relied on the computing resources of the ENEA/CRESCO infrastructure [ 58 ].

The Semantic Brand Score (SBS) is a measure of semantic importance that combines methods of social network analysis and text mining. It is usually applied for the analysis of (big) textual data to evaluate the importance of one or more brands, names, words, or sets of keywords [ 36 ]. Indeed, the concept of “brand” is intended in a flexible way and goes beyond products or commercial brands. In this study, we evaluate the SBS time-trends of the keywords defining the research topics discussed in the previous section. Semantic importance comprises the three dimensions of topic prevalence, diversity and connectivity. Prevalence measures how frequently a research topic is used in the discourse. The more a topic is mentioned by scientific articles, the more the research community will be aware of it, with possible increase of future studies; this construct is partly related to that of brand awareness [ 59 ]. This effect is even stronger, considering that we are analyzing the title, abstract and keywords of the papers, i.e. the parts that have the highest visibility. A very important characteristic of the SBS is that it considers the relationships among words in a text. Topic importance is not just a matter of how frequently a topic is mentioned, but also of the associations a topic has in the text. Specifically, texts are transformed into networks of co-occurring words, and relationships are studied through social network analysis [ 60 ]. This step is necessary to calculate the other two dimensions of our semantic importance indicator. Accordingly, a social network of words is generated for each time period considered in the analysis–i.e., a graph made of n nodes (words) and E edges weighted by co-occurrence frequency, with W being the set of edge weights. The keywords representing each topic were clustered into single nodes.

The construct of diversity relates to that of brand image [ 59 ], in the sense that it considers the richness and distinctiveness of textual (topic) associations. Considering the above-mentioned networks, we calculated diversity using the distinctiveness centrality metric–as in the formula presented by Fronzetti Colladon and Naldi [ 61 ].

Lastly, connectivity was measured as the weighted betweenness centrality [ 62 , 63 ] of each research topic node. We used the formula presented by Wasserman and Faust [ 60 ]. The dimension of connectivity represents the “brokerage power” of each research topic–i.e., how much it can serve as a bridge to connect other terms (and ultimately topics) in the discourse [ 36 ].

The SBS is the final composite indicator obtained by summing the standardized scores of prevalence, diversity and connectivity. Standardization was carried out considering all the words in the corpus, for each specific timeframe.

This methodology, applied to a large and heterogeneous body of text, enables to automatically identify two important sets of information that add value to the literature review. Firstly, the relevance of each topic in literature is measured through a composite indicator of semantic importance, rather than simply looking at word frequencies. This provides a much richer picture of the topics that are at the center of the discourse, as well as of the topics that are emerging in the literature. Secondly, it enables to examine the extent of the semantic relationship between topics, looking at how tightly their discourses are linked. In a field such as gender equality, where many topics are closely linked to each other and present overlaps in issues and solutions, this methodology offers a novel perspective with respect to traditional literature reviews. In addition, it ensures reproducibility over time and the possibility to semi-automatically update the analysis, as new papers become available.

Overview of main topics

In terms of descriptive textual statistics, our corpus is made of 15,465 text documents, consisting of a total of 2,685,893 lemmatized tokens (words) and 32,279 types. As a result, the type-token ratio is 1.2%. The number of hapaxes is 12,141, with a hapax-token ratio of 37.61%.

Fig 1 shows the list of 27 topics by decreasing SBS. The most researched topic is compensation , exceeding all others in prevalence, diversity, and connectivity. This means it is not only mentioned more often than other topics, but it is also connected to a greater number of other topics and is central to the discourse on gender equality. The next four topics are, in order of SBS, role , education , decision-making , and career progression . These topics, except for education , all concern women in the workforce. Between these first five topics and the following ones there is a clear drop in SBS scores. In particular, the topics that follow have a lower connectivity than the first five. They are hiring , performance , behavior , organization , and human capital . Again, except for behavior and human capital , the other three topics are purely related to women in the workforce. After another drop-off, the following topics deal prevalently with women in society. This trend highlights that research on gender in business journals has so far mainly paid attention to the conditions that women experience in business contexts, while also devoting some attention to women in society.

Fig 2 shows the SBS time series of the top 10 topics. While there has been a general increase in the number of Scopus-indexed publications in the last decade, we notice that some SBS trends remain steady, or even decrease. In particular, we observe that the main topic of the last twenty-two years, compensation , is losing momentum. Since 2016, it has been surpassed by decision-making , education and role , which may indicate that literature is increasingly attempting to identify root causes of compensation inequalities. Moreover, in the last two years, the topics of hiring , performance , and organization are experiencing the largest importance increase.

Fig 3 shows the SBS time trends of the remaining 17 topics (i.e., those not in the top 10). As we can see from the graph, there are some that maintain a steady trend–such as reputation , management , networks and governance , which also seem to have little importance. More relevant topics with average stationary trends (except for the last two years) are culture , family , and parenting . The feminine topic is among the most important here, and one of those that exhibit the larger variations over time (similarly to leadership ). On the other hand, the are some topics that, even if not among the most important, show increasing SBS trends; therefore, they could be considered as emerging topics and could become popular in the near future. These are entrepreneurship , leadership , board of directors , and sustainability . These emerging topics are also interesting to anticipate future trends in gender equality research that are conducive to overall equality in society.

In addition to the SBS score of the different topics, the network of terms they are associated to enables to gauge the extent to which their images (textual associations) overlap or differ ( Fig 4 ).

There is a central cluster of topics with high similarity, which are all connected with women in the workforce. The cluster includes topics such as organization , decision-making , performance , hiring , human capital , education and compensation . In addition, the topic of well-being is found within this cluster, suggesting that women’s equality in the workforce is associated to well-being considerations. The emerging topics of entrepreneurship and leadership are also closely connected with each other, possibly implying that leadership is a much-researched quality in female entrepreneurship. Topics that are relatively more distant include personality , politics , feminine , empowerment , management , board of directors , reputation , governance , parenting , masculine and network .

The following sections describe the top 10 topics and their main associations in literature (see Table 3 ), while providing a brief overview of the emerging topics.

Compensation

The topic of compensation is related to the topics of role , hiring , education and career progression , however, also sees a very high association with the words gap and inequality . Indeed, a well-known debate in degrowth economics centers around whether and how to adequately compensate women for their childbearing, childrearing, caregiver and household work [e.g., 30 ].

Even in paid work, women continue being offered lower compensations than their male counterparts who have the same job or cover the same role [ 64 – 67 ]. This severe inequality has been widely studied by scholars over the last twenty-two years. Dealing with this topic, some specific roles have been addressed. Specifically, research highlighted differences in compensation between female and male CEOs [e.g., 68 ], top executives [e.g., 69 ], and boards’ directors [e.g., 70 ]. Scholars investigated the determinants of these gaps, such as the gender composition of the board [e.g., 71 – 73 ] or women’s individual characteristics [e.g., 71 , 74 ].

Among these individual characteristics, education plays a relevant role [ 75 ]. Education is indeed presented as the solution for women, not only to achieve top executive roles, but also to reduce wage inequality [e.g., 76 , 77 ]. Past research has highlighted education influences on gender wage gaps, specifically referring to gender differences in skills [e.g., 78 ], college majors [e.g., 79 ], and college selectivity [e.g., 80 ].

Finally, the wage gap issue is strictly interrelated with hiring –e.g., looking at whether being a mother affects hiring and compensation [e.g., 65 , 81 ] or relating compensation to unemployment [e.g., 82 ]–and career progression –for instance looking at meritocracy [ 83 , 84 ] or the characteristics of the boss for whom women work [e.g., 85 ].

The roles covered by women have been deeply investigated. Scholars have focused on the role of women in their families and the society as a whole [e.g., 14 , 15 ], and, more widely, in business contexts [e.g., 18 , 81 ]. Indeed, despite still lagging behind their male counterparts [e.g., 86 , 87 ], in the last decade there has been an increase in top ranked positions achieved by women [e.g., 88 , 89 ]. Following this phenomenon, scholars have posed greater attention towards the presence of women in the board of directors [e.g., 16 , 18 , 90 , 91 ], given the increasing pressure to appoint female directors that firms, especially listed ones, have experienced. Other scholars have focused on the presence of women covering the role of CEO [e.g., 17 , 92 ] or being part of the top management team [e.g., 93 ]. Irrespectively of the level of analysis, all these studies tried to uncover the antecedents of women’s presence among top managers [e.g., 92 , 94 ] and the consequences of having a them involved in the firm’s decision-making –e.g., on performance [e.g., 19 , 95 , 96 ], risk [e.g., 97 , 98 ], and corporate social responsibility [e.g., 99 , 100 ].

Besides studying the difficulties and discriminations faced by women in getting a job [ 81 , 101 ], and, more specifically in the hiring , appointment, or career progression to these apical roles [e.g., 70 , 83 ], the majority of research of women’s roles dealt with compensation issues. Specifically, scholars highlight the pay-gap that still exists between women and men, both in general [e.g., 64 , 65 ], as well as referring to boards’ directors [e.g., 70 , 102 ], CEOs and executives [e.g., 69 , 103 , 104 ].

Finally, other scholars focused on the behavior of women when dealing with business. In this sense, particular attention has been paid to leadership and entrepreneurial behaviors. The former quite overlaps with dealing with the roles mentioned above, but also includes aspects such as leaders being stereotyped as masculine [e.g., 105 ], the need for greater exposure to female leaders to reduce biases [e.g., 106 ], or female leaders acting as queen bees [e.g., 107 ]. Regarding entrepreneurship , scholars mainly investigated women’s entrepreneurial entry [e.g., 108 , 109 ], differences between female and male entrepreneurs in the evaluations and funding received from investors [e.g., 110 , 111 ], and their performance gap [e.g., 112 , 113 ].

Education has long been recognized as key to social advancement and economic stability [ 114 ], for job progression and also a barrier to gender equality, especially in STEM-related fields. Research on education and gender equality is mostly linked with the topics of compensation , human capital , career progression , hiring , parenting and decision-making .

Education contributes to a higher human capital [ 115 ] and constitutes an investment on the part of women towards their future. In this context, literature points to the gender gap in educational attainment, and the consequences for women from a social, economic, personal and professional standpoint. Women are found to have less access to formal education and information, especially in emerging countries, which in turn may cause them to lose social and economic opportunities [e.g., 12 , 116 – 119 ]. Education in local and rural communities is also paramount to communicate the benefits of female empowerment , contributing to overall societal well-being [e.g., 120 ].

Once women access education, the image they have of the world and their place in society (i.e., habitus) affects their education performance [ 13 ] and is passed on to their children. These situations reinforce gender stereotypes, which become self-fulfilling prophecies that may negatively affect female students’ performance by lowering their confidence and heightening their anxiety [ 121 , 122 ]. Besides formal education, also the information that women are exposed to on a daily basis contributes to their human capital . Digital inequalities, for instance, stems from men spending more time online and acquiring higher digital skills than women [ 123 ].

Education is also a factor that should boost employability of candidates and thus hiring , career progression and compensation , however the relationship between these factors is not straightforward [ 115 ]. First, educational choices ( decision-making ) are influenced by variables such as self-efficacy and the presence of barriers, irrespectively of the career opportunities they offer, especially in STEM [ 124 ]. This brings additional difficulties to women’s enrollment and persistence in scientific and technical fields of study due to stereotypes and biases [ 125 , 126 ]. Moreover, access to education does not automatically translate into job opportunities for women and minority groups [ 127 , 128 ] or into female access to managerial positions [ 129 ].

Finally, parenting is reported as an antecedent of education [e.g., 130 ], with much of the literature focusing on the role of parents’ education on the opportunities afforded to children to enroll in education [ 131 – 134 ] and the role of parenting in their offspring’s perception of study fields and attitudes towards learning [ 135 – 138 ]. Parental education is also a predictor of the other related topics, namely human capital and compensation [ 139 ].

Decision-making

This literature mainly points to the fact that women are thought to make decisions differently than men. Women have indeed different priorities, such as they care more about people’s well-being, working with people or helping others, rather than maximizing their personal (or their firm’s) gain [ 140 ]. In other words, women typically present more communal than agentic behaviors, which are instead more frequent among men [ 141 ]. These different attitude, behavior and preferences in turn affect the decisions they make [e.g., 142 ] and the decision-making of the firm in which they work [e.g., 143 ].

At the individual level, gender affects, for instance, career aspirations [e.g., 144 ] and choices [e.g., 142 , 145 ], or the decision of creating a venture [e.g., 108 , 109 , 146 ]. Moreover, in everyday life, women and men make different decisions regarding partners [e.g., 147 ], childcare [e.g., 148 ], education [e.g., 149 ], attention to the environment [e.g., 150 ] and politics [e.g., 151 ].

At the firm level, scholars highlighted, for example, how the presence of women in the board affects corporate decisions [e.g., 152 , 153 ], that female CEOs are more conservative in accounting decisions [e.g., 154 ], or that female CFOs tend to make more conservative decisions regarding the firm’s financial reporting [e.g., 155 ]. Nevertheless, firm level research also investigated decisions that, influenced by gender bias, affect women, such as those pertaining hiring [e.g., 156 , 157 ], compensation [e.g., 73 , 158 ], or the empowerment of women once appointed [ 159 ].

Career progression

Once women have entered the workforce, the key aspect to achieve gender equality becomes career progression , including efforts toward overcoming the glass ceiling. Indeed, according to the SBS analysis, career progression is highly related to words such as work, social issues and equality. The topic with which it has the highest semantic overlap is role , followed by decision-making , hiring , education , compensation , leadership , human capital , and family .

Career progression implies an advancement in the hierarchical ladder of the firm, assigning managerial roles to women. Coherently, much of the literature has focused on identifying rationales for a greater female participation in the top management team and board of directors [e.g., 95 ] as well as the best criteria to ensure that the decision-makers promote the most valuable employees irrespectively of their individual characteristics, such as gender [e.g., 84 ]. The link between career progression , role and compensation is often provided in practice by performance appraisal exercises, frequently rooted in a culture of meritocracy that guides bonuses, salary increases and promotions. However, performance appraisals can actually mask gender-biased decisions where women are held to higher standards than their male colleagues [e.g., 83 , 84 , 95 , 160 , 161 ]. Women often have less opportunities to gain leadership experience and are less visible than their male colleagues, which constitute barriers to career advancement [e.g., 162 ]. Therefore, transparency and accountability, together with procedures that discourage discretionary choices, are paramount to achieve a fair career progression [e.g., 84 ], together with the relaxation of strict job boundaries in favor of cross-functional and self-directed tasks [e.g., 163 ].

In addition, a series of stereotypes about the type of leadership characteristics that are required for top management positions, which fit better with typical male and agentic attributes, are another key barrier to career advancement for women [e.g., 92 , 160 ].

Hiring is the entrance gateway for women into the workforce. Therefore, it is related to other workforce topics such as compensation , role , career progression , decision-making , human capital , performance , organization and education .

A first stream of literature focuses on the process leading up to candidates’ job applications, demonstrating that bias exists before positions are even opened, and it is perpetuated both by men and women through networking and gatekeeping practices [e.g., 164 , 165 ].

The hiring process itself is also subject to biases [ 166 ], for example gender-congruity bias that leads to men being preferred candidates in male-dominated sectors [e.g., 167 ], women being hired in positions with higher risk of failure [e.g., 168 ] and limited transparency and accountability afforded by written processes and procedures [e.g., 164 ] that all contribute to ascriptive inequality. In addition, providing incentives for evaluators to hire women may actually work to this end; however, this is not the case when supporting female candidates endangers higher-ranking male ones [ 169 ].

Another interesting perspective, instead, looks at top management teams’ composition and the effects on hiring practices, indicating that firms with more women in top management are less likely to lay off staff [e.g., 152 ].

Performance

Several scholars posed their attention towards women’s performance, its consequences [e.g., 170 , 171 ] and the implications of having women in decision-making positions [e.g., 18 , 19 ].

At the individual level, research focused on differences in educational and academic performance between women and men, especially referring to the gender gap in STEM fields [e.g., 171 ]. The presence of stereotype threats–that is the expectation that the members of a social group (e.g., women) “must deal with the possibility of being judged or treated stereotypically, or of doing something that would confirm the stereotype” [ 172 ]–affects women’s interested in STEM [e.g., 173 ], as well as their cognitive ability tests, penalizing them [e.g., 174 ]. A stronger gender identification enhances this gap [e.g., 175 ], whereas mentoring and role models can be used as solutions to this problem [e.g., 121 ]. Despite the negative effect of stereotype threats on girls’ performance [ 176 ], female and male students perform equally in mathematics and related subjects [e.g., 177 ]. Moreover, while individuals’ performance at school and university generally affects their achievements and the field in which they end up working, evidence reveals that performance in math or other scientific subjects does not explain why fewer women enter STEM working fields; rather this gap depends on other aspects, such as culture, past working experiences, or self-efficacy [e.g., 170 ]. Finally, scholars have highlighted the penalization that women face for their positive performance, for instance when they succeed in traditionally male areas [e.g., 178 ]. This penalization is explained by the violation of gender-stereotypic prescriptions [e.g., 179 , 180 ], that is having women well performing in agentic areas, which are typical associated to men. Performance penalization can thus be overcome by clearly conveying communal characteristics and behaviors [ 178 ].

Evidence has been provided on how the involvement of women in boards of directors and decision-making positions affects firms’ performance. Nevertheless, results are mixed, with some studies showing positive effects on financial [ 19 , 181 , 182 ] and corporate social performance [ 99 , 182 , 183 ]. Other studies maintain a negative association [e.g., 18 ], and other again mixed [e.g., 184 ] or non-significant association [e.g., 185 ]. Also with respect to the presence of a female CEO, mixed results emerged so far, with some researches demonstrating a positive effect on firm’s performance [e.g., 96 , 186 ], while other obtaining only a limited evidence of this relationship [e.g., 103 ] or a negative one [e.g., 187 ].

Finally, some studies have investigated whether and how women’s performance affects their hiring [e.g., 101 ] and career progression [e.g., 83 , 160 ]. For instance, academic performance leads to different returns in hiring for women and men. Specifically, high-achieving men are called back significantly more often than high-achieving women, which are penalized when they have a major in mathematics; this result depends on employers’ gendered standards for applicants [e.g., 101 ]. Once appointed, performance ratings are more strongly related to promotions for women than men, and promoted women typically show higher past performance ratings than those of promoted men. This suggesting that women are subject to stricter standards for promotion [e.g., 160 ].

Behavioral aspects related to gender follow two main streams of literature. The first examines female personality and behavior in the workplace, and their alignment with cultural expectations or stereotypes [e.g., 188 ] as well as their impacts on equality. There is a common bias that depicts women as less agentic than males. Certain characteristics, such as those more congruent with male behaviors–e.g., self-promotion [e.g., 189 ], negotiation skills [e.g., 190 ] and general agentic behavior [e.g., 191 ]–, are less accepted in women. However, characteristics such as individualism in women have been found to promote greater gender equality in society [ 192 ]. In addition, behaviors such as display of emotions [e.g., 193 ], which are stereotypically female, work against women’s acceptance in the workplace, requiring women to carefully moderate their behavior to avoid exclusion. A counter-intuitive result is that women and minorities, which are more marginalized in the workplace, tend to be better problem-solvers in innovation competitions due to their different knowledge bases [ 194 ].

The other side of the coin is examined in a parallel literature stream on behavior towards women in the workplace. As a result of biases, prejudices and stereotypes, women may experience adverse behavior from their colleagues, such as incivility and harassment, which undermine their well-being [e.g., 195 , 196 ]. Biases that go beyond gender, such as for overweight people, are also more strongly applied to women [ 197 ].

Organization

The role of women and gender bias in organizations has been studied from different perspectives, which mirror those presented in detail in the following sections. Specifically, most research highlighted the stereotypical view of leaders [e.g., 105 ] and the roles played by women within firms, for instance referring to presence in the board of directors [e.g., 18 , 90 , 91 ], appointment as CEOs [e.g., 16 ], or top executives [e.g., 93 ].

Scholars have investigated antecedents and consequences of the presence of women in these apical roles. On the one side they looked at hiring and career progression [e.g., 83 , 92 , 160 , 168 , 198 ], finding women typically disadvantaged with respect to their male counterparts. On the other side, they studied women’s leadership styles and influence on the firm’s decision-making [e.g., 152 , 154 , 155 , 199 ], with implications for performance [e.g., 18 , 19 , 96 ].

Human capital

Human capital is a transverse topic that touches upon many different aspects of female gender equality. As such, it has the most associations with other topics, starting with education as mentioned above, with career-related topics such as role , decision-making , hiring , career progression , performance , compensation , leadership and organization . Another topic with which there is a close connection is behavior . In general, human capital is approached both from the education standpoint but also from the perspective of social capital.

The behavioral aspect in human capital comprises research related to gender differences for example in cultural and religious beliefs that influence women’s attitudes and perceptions towards STEM subjects [ 142 , 200 – 202 ], towards employment [ 203 ] or towards environmental issues [ 150 , 204 ]. These cultural differences also emerge in the context of globalization which may accelerate gender equality in the workforce [ 205 , 206 ]. Gender differences also appear in behaviors such as motivation [ 207 ], and in negotiation [ 190 ], and have repercussions on women’s decision-making related to their careers. The so-called gender equality paradox sees women in countries with lower gender equality more likely to pursue studies and careers in STEM fields, whereas the gap in STEM enrollment widens as countries achieve greater equality in society [ 171 ].

Career progression is modeled by literature as a choice-process where personal preferences, culture and decision-making affect the chosen path and the outcomes. Some literature highlights how women tend to self-select into different professions than men, often due to stereotypes rather than actual ability to perform in these professions [ 142 , 144 ]. These stereotypes also affect the perceptions of female performance or the amount of human capital required to equal male performance [ 110 , 193 , 208 ], particularly for mothers [ 81 ]. It is therefore often assumed that women are better suited to less visible and less leadership -oriented roles [ 209 ]. Women also express differing preferences towards work-family balance, which affect whether and how they pursue human capital gains [ 210 ], and ultimately their career progression and salary .

On the other hand, men are often unaware of gendered processes and behaviors that they carry forward in their interactions and decision-making [ 211 , 212 ]. Therefore, initiatives aimed at increasing managers’ human capital –by raising awareness of gender disparities in their organizations and engaging them in diversity promotion–are essential steps to counter gender bias and segregation [ 213 ].

Emerging topics: Leadership and entrepreneurship

Among the emerging topics, the most pervasive one is women reaching leadership positions in the workforce and in society. This is still a rare occurrence for two main types of factors, on the one hand, bias and discrimination make it harder for women to access leadership positions [e.g., 214 – 216 ], on the other hand, the competitive nature and high pressure associated with leadership positions, coupled with the lack of women currently represented, reduce women’s desire to achieve them [e.g., 209 , 217 ]. Women are more effective leaders when they have access to education, resources and a diverse environment with representation [e.g., 218 , 219 ].

One sector where there is potential for women to carve out a leadership role is entrepreneurship . Although at the start of the millennium the discourse on entrepreneurship was found to be “discriminatory, gender-biased, ethnocentrically determined and ideologically controlled” [ 220 ], an increasing body of literature is studying how to stimulate female entrepreneurship as an alternative pathway to wealth, leadership and empowerment [e.g., 221 ]. Many barriers exist for women to access entrepreneurship, including the institutional and legal environment, social and cultural factors, access to knowledge and resources, and individual behavior [e.g., 222 , 223 ]. Education has been found to raise women’s entrepreneurial intentions [e.g., 224 ], although this effect is smaller than for men [e.g., 109 ]. In addition, increasing self-efficacy and risk-taking behavior constitute important success factors [e.g., 225 ].

Finally, the topic of sustainability is worth mentioning, as it is the primary objective of the SDGs and is closely associated with societal well-being. As society grapples with the effects of climate change and increasing depletion of natural resources, a narrative has emerged on women and their greater link to the environment [ 226 ]. Studies in developed countries have found some support for women leaders’ attention to sustainability issues in firms [e.g., 227 – 229 ], and smaller resource consumption by women [ 230 ]. At the same time, women will likely be more affected by the consequences of climate change [e.g., 230 ] but often lack the decision-making power to influence local decision-making on resource management and environmental policies [e.g., 231 ].

Research gaps and conclusions

Research on gender equality has advanced rapidly in the past decades, with a steady increase in publications, both in mainstream topics related to women in education and the workforce, and in emerging topics. Through a novel approach combining methods of text mining and social network analysis, we examined a comprehensive body of literature comprising 15,465 papers published between 2000 and mid 2021 on topics related to gender equality. We identified a set of 27 topics addressed by the literature and examined their connections.

At the highest level of abstraction, it is worth noting that papers abound on the identification of issues related to gender inequalities and imbalances in the workforce and in society. Literature has thoroughly examined the (unconscious) biases, barriers, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors that women are facing as a result of their gender. Instead, there are much fewer papers that discuss or demonstrate effective solutions to overcome gender bias [e.g., 121 , 143 , 145 , 163 , 194 , 213 , 232 ]. This is partly due to the relative ease in studying the status quo, as opposed to studying changes in the status quo. However, we observed a shift in the more recent years towards solution seeking in this domain, which we strongly encourage future researchers to focus on. In the future, we may focus on collecting and mapping pro-active contributions to gender studies, using additional Natural Language Processing techniques, able to measure the sentiment of scientific papers [ 43 ].

All of the mainstream topics identified in our literature review are closely related, and there is a wealth of insights looking at the intersection between issues such as education and career progression or human capital and role . However, emerging topics are worthy of being furtherly explored. It would be interesting to see more work on the topic of female entrepreneurship , exploring aspects such as education , personality , governance , management and leadership . For instance, how can education support female entrepreneurship? How can self-efficacy and risk-taking behaviors be taught or enhanced? What are the differences in managerial and governance styles of female entrepreneurs? Which personality traits are associated with successful entrepreneurs? Which traits are preferred by venture capitalists and funding bodies?

The emerging topic of sustainability also deserves further attention, as our society struggles with climate change and its consequences. It would be interesting to see more research on the intersection between sustainability and entrepreneurship , looking at how female entrepreneurs are tackling sustainability issues, examining both their business models and their company governance . In addition, scholars are suggested to dig deeper into the relationship between family values and behaviors.

Moreover, it would be relevant to understand how women’s networks (social capital), or the composition and structure of social networks involving both women and men, enable them to increase their remuneration and reach top corporate positions, participate in key decision-making bodies, and have a voice in communities. Furthermore, the achievement of gender equality might significantly change firm networks and ecosystems, with important implications for their performance and survival.

Similarly, research at the nexus of (corporate) governance , career progression , compensation and female empowerment could yield useful insights–for example discussing how enterprises, institutions and countries are managed and the impact for women and other minorities. Are there specific governance structures that favor diversity and inclusion?

Lastly, we foresee an emerging stream of research pertaining how the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic challenged women, especially in the workforce, by making gender biases more evident.

For our analysis, we considered a set of 15,465 articles downloaded from the Scopus database (which is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature). As we were interested in reviewing business and economics related gender studies, we only considered those papers published in journals listed in the Academic Journal Guide (AJG) 2018 ranking of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS). All the journals listed in this ranking are also indexed by Scopus. Therefore, looking at a single database (i.e., Scopus) should not be considered a limitation of our study. However, future research could consider different databases and inclusion criteria.

With our literature review, we offer researchers a comprehensive map of major gender-related research trends over the past twenty-two years. This can serve as a lens to look to the future, contributing to the achievement of SDG5. Researchers may use our study as a starting point to identify key themes addressed in the literature. In addition, our methodological approach–based on the use of the Semantic Brand Score and its webapp–could support scholars interested in reviewing other areas of research.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

The computing resources and the related technical support used for this work have been provided by CRESCO/ENEAGRID High Performance Computing infrastructure and its staff. CRESCO/ENEAGRID High Performance Computing infrastructure is funded by ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and by Italian and European research programmes (see http://www.cresco.enea.it/english for information).

Funding Statement

P.B and F.C.: Grant of the Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction of the University of Pisa (DESTEC) for the project “Measuring Gender Bias with Semantic Analysis: The Development of an Assessment Tool and its Application in the European Space Industry. P.B., F.C., A.F.C., P.R.: Grant of the Italian Association of Management Engineering (AiIG), “Misure di sostegno ai soci giovani AiIG” 2020, for the project “Gender Equality Through Data Intelligence (GEDI)”. F.C.: EU project ASSETs+ Project (Alliance for Strategic Skills addressing Emerging Technologies in Defence) EAC/A03/2018 - Erasmus+ programme, Sector Skills Alliances, Lot 3: Sector Skills Alliance for implementing a new strategic approach (Blueprint) to sectoral cooperation on skills G.A. NUMBER: 612678-EPP-1-2019-1-IT-EPPKA2-SSA-B.

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Essay on Gender Equality And Women’s Empowerment

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100 Words Essay on Gender Equality And Women’s Empowerment

Understanding gender equality.

Gender equality means that men and women have the same rights and opportunities. It’s like having two different types of fruits, say an apple and an orange, and giving them the same amount of care, sunlight, and water to grow. No one is better than the other; they are just different but equally important.

What is Women’s Empowerment?

Women’s empowerment is about making sure women can make their own choices in life. It’s like teaching someone to ride a bike. Once they learn, they can go anywhere they want, do things on their own, and feel strong.

Education and Jobs

For true gender equality, both boys and girls should go to school and learn. When they grow up, women should have the same chances to get good jobs as men. Think of it as a game where everyone gets a fair turn to play and show their skills.

Leadership Roles

Women should also be leaders, like being the captain of a team or the president of a club. This shows everyone that girls can lead and make important decisions just as well as boys can.

Equality at Home

250 words essay on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Gender equality means that men and women have the same rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. It’s like a game where everyone gets a fair chance to play, no matter if they are a boy or a girl. Everyone should be able to go to school, work, and take part in making decisions.

Women’s Empowerment

Women’s empowerment is about giving girls and women the power to make their own choices. It’s like letting them be the captain of their own ship. They can decide what they want to study, where they want to work, and stand up for what they believe is right.

Why It’s Important

When women and men are equal, it’s good for everyone. Women can bring new ideas and skills to the table, which can help solve problems better and make the world a nicer place to live. It’s also fair that everyone gets to chase their dreams and be happy.

Challenges to Overcome

Sadly, not all places have gender equality. Some girls are kept from going to school, and some women are not allowed to work or have to work harder for less money. It’s important to change this so that everyone has the same chances in life.

How to Support Equality

To help, we can make sure that both boys and girls know that they are equal. We can also stand up for our friends if they are being treated unfairly. By working together, we can build a world where everyone is respected and can live the life they choose.

500 Words Essay on Gender Equality And Women’s Empowerment

Women’s empowerment is about giving girls and women the power to make choices for themselves. It’s like letting them decide what clothes to wear or what games to play, instead of someone else telling them what to do. Empowerment helps women to speak up, get a good education, and find jobs that they want to do.

Why Gender Equality is Important

When girls and boys, or women and men, are treated equally, it’s good for everyone. It’s like a team game where every player gets a fair chance to play, making the team stronger. Countries with gender equality are usually happier and wealthier because everyone can work, create new things, and help make decisions.

Challenges in Achieving Gender Equality

Education and gender equality.

Education is a powerful tool for gender equality. When girls go to school and learn just like boys, they can get better jobs and make better choices for their lives. It’s like giving them a key to a big door that leads to a world of opportunities.

Women in Leadership

Having more women in leadership roles is also important for gender equality. Leaders make big decisions that affect everyone. When women are leaders, they can make sure that the needs and ideas of both women and men are included. It’s like making sure that both sides of a story are heard before deciding what to do.

How to Support Gender Equality

In the end, gender equality and women’s empowerment are about making sure that everyone, no matter if they are a boy or a girl, has the same chances in life. It’s like a game where the rules are fair for all players, and everyone can win. When we work together to treat everyone equally, we make the world a better place for everyone.

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What Does Gender Equality Mean?

The world’s gender ratio is around 50:50, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that women are marginalized. Studies show that it will take a century to close the global pay gap . Despite decades of progress, gender equality remains distant. What does gender equality truly mean? And how do we get there?

Gender equality: a definition

Gender equality means that all genders are free to pursue whatever career, lifestyle choice, and abilities they want without discrimination. Their rights, opportunities, and access to society are not different based on their gender. Gender equality does not necessarily mean that everyone is treated exactly the same. Their different needs and dreams are valued equally. Gender equity is often discussed at the same time as gender equality for this reason. Since society has favored men for so long, men have many advantages. Equity fills in the gaps so everyone else can “catch up” to men. It addresses discrimination and imbalances in society so that equality can become a reality.

Benefits of gender equality

Achieving gender equality will have a significant positive impact on the world. Here are just a few of the benefits:

#1 Better business

Studies show that gender diversity improves an organization ’s innovation and productivity. When women are given equal education (and as a result, equal job opportunities) compared to men, the businesses they join thrive.

#2 Better economy

When women can participate in the economy in the same way as men, the economy does better. Closing the gender pay gap plays a significant role in this. Studies show that if OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries matched Sweden in their female employment rates, the GDP would increase by $6 trillion.

#3 Reduced poverty

Girls and women make up the world’s poorest populations. Because they aren’t given equal education, job opportunities , and income, cycles of poverty repeat themselves. By giving women the same opportunities as men, it would raise up entire families from poverty and reduce the world’s poverty rate.

#4 Better health

Because of barriers like income and lack of education, access to good healthcare is often challenging for women. Even without those obstacles, women are often not taken seriously. There’s also less research on conditions that mostly affect women. If gender equality became realized in healthcare, women would get better care, leading to improvements in a society’s overall health. Studies also show that gender equality has a link to the improvement of children’s health. Women with equal education and income can care for their children better.

What does gender equality look like?

What would gender equality mean in practice? How would the world be different? Here are just a few of the outcomes:

More girls would be educated

A lack of education is one of the most significant results of gender inequality . If girls’ education was given the same priority as boys’, more girls would be in school. This would set them up for better job opportunities and income in the future.

More women would be in the workplace (and workplace leadership)

Currently, women are not as represented as men in the workplace, especially in leadership . If barriers to their success were removed, they would be better represented.

Families would be stronger

Men are negatively affected by gender inequality. This is especially clear when it comes to paid family leave. Because women are considered the primary caregivers for children, men are often unable to get time off. This is also true when it comes to caring for older family members. If both men and women were able to take time off for family without discrimination based on gender, it would strengthen families.

More women would participate in politics

Most political systems are still biased in favor of men. If gender equality was realized, the world would see a lot more women engaged in the political process. This includes political leadership.

How can we make gender equality a reality?

The world is a long way from achieving gender equality. What needs to happen for it to become real? There are three essential actions:

The first step toward any progress is awareness. If a society isn’t able to acknowledge gender inequality, changes will be nearly impossible. To make gender equality a reality, people need to be aware of the current state of affairs and the benefits of change.

Many believe that the most significant obstacle to gender equality is unequal access to education. Without the same education as boys, girls are limited in their income and job prospects. This has a domino effect in every area of their lives. To tackle gender inequality at the start, education for girls and women needs to be a top priority.

Legislative support

There are many laws and systems in place that fuel gender inequality. To break those systems down, laws that discriminate need to be repealed and new laws put in place. These laws hold organizations and institutions accountable. Governments, legislators, and activists all play a part in this process.

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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.

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How Employers Can Increase the Number of Women in Leadership Roles—and Why They Should

In 2014, the tech giant Lenovo recognized a problem in its workforce.

Although women make up more than 30% of Lenovo’s roughly 77,000 employees, the number of women on its executive leadership team was trending downward. In 2014, that number hit a new low: only 14% of executive-level roles were held by women.

“It was a tremendous red flag for us,” explained Jennifer Broerman Spencer, director of global diversity and inclusion at Lenovo. “We knew that it wasn’t trending in the right direction, and we had to take an intervention.”

As a result, the firm decided to create a leadership program to increase the number of female leaders in its workforce, a program that has now been in place for a decade. Broerman Spencer says that it has been a big boon to the company’s inclusion and diversity efforts—and its overall success.

Lenovo isn’t the only organization identifying gaps when it comes to gender equality and opportunities for promotion—and working to make changes.

Women in leadership is a rising focus for many workplaces, with many industry insiders pointing out the benefits that female leaders bring.

“Anecdotally speaking, I have seen growing momentum for women in leadership roles,” says Vicki Salemi, a career expert at jobs site Monster. “This needs to continue. It’s not a trend, as that implies it’s seasonal and will fade—it should be here to stay.”

But even though heightened attention is being paid to the topic of women in leadership, there have been bumps in the road to progress.

Women represent roughly 1 in 4 C-suite leaders, and women of color represent just 1 in 16, according to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2024 report . Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that although more women than ever are working, many working women are reporting fewer promotions and salary increases.

Meanwhile, according to the S&P Global Total Market Index, in 2023, the growth in women’s representation among all senior leadership positions in the U.S. dropped to the lowest rate in more than a decade: 0.5% versus 1.2% on average.

The drop in women’s leadership roles “is definitely something we don’t want to see become a trend across multiple years,” says Ella Washington. She is a professor of practice at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and the founder and CEO of Ellavate Solutions, a consulting firm that focuses on inclusion, equity, and diversity.

Furthermore, female employees are more likely than their male counterparts to indicate that more employer support is needed. According to a Monster survey earlier this year , the majority of men (67%) think that all employees at their organization receive the same quality and quantity of opportunities, whereas only 33% of women agree. And 60% of women think that men get a seat at the table more often than women at their company, but only 12% of men agree. Disparities exist for salary, as well: 71% of men think that they are paid the same as women by their employer, contrasted with only 28% of women who agree.

That’s all ripe for change.

Diversity of Thought

Female executives are important for the same reason that greater diversity is vital to businesses, Washington explains.

“Different lived experiences provide us with different strengths, skills, and perspectives. The experiences of women are important additions in all of these ways that other leaders have impact,” she says. “Their unique way of being strategic, leading teams, and making decisions helps make the workplace more innovative and collaborative. Women do not hold a standard set of skills; everyone’s offerings are different, and that is why a diversity of women in executive roles is a strength for an organization.”

Having female executives is also important for developing and inspiring future female executives, Washington says: “Representation at the top is vital for establishing greater inclusion and community throughout the organization.”

Women bring many skills to the table. For one thing, women are now more educated than men in the U.S. , with women outnumbering men among the college-educated labor force. Other experts point to the productivity and multitasking skills women can bring to businesses.

“Women get stuff done, bringing valuable acumen, skills, and experiences to the workplace while being maestros of multitasking,” Salemi says. 

What Employers Are Doing

There are numerous strategies that employers can implement to help increase the number of women in leadership roles.

After finding that just 14% of its leadership team was made up of women, Lenovo leveraged Advancing Women Leaders, a SHRM/Linkage Signature Solution. Through it, Lenovo offered targeted learning and development opportunities to director-level women through a 10-month women’s leadership development program. Since 2015, eight cohorts of Lenovo employees, totaling 170 female leaders, have completed the program.

The tech firm has increased the percentage of women in executive-level roles from 14% to 22%. It hopes to increase that figure to 27% in the next couple of years, Broerman Spencer says.

“I think we’re going to come close, and whether we hit the goal, we will celebrate for a moment and we will set another one and we will continue,” Broerman Spencer says. “And if we fall short, it’s just another excuse to double down.”

Promoting leadership programs and career development opportunities, such as the Linkage program leveraged by Lenovo, is among the many strategies that employers can adopt. Others include ensuring fair pay for women , offering comprehensive benefits, and providing access to employee resource groups dedicated to women.

One of the first steps employers can take toward making sure women can thrive in the workplace is to take stock of their workforce, suggests Roshan Kindred, chief diversity officer at San Francisco-based tech firm PagerDuty.

She explains that conducting a comprehensive audit of staff—considering gender, race, authority, and salary—to identify areas where organizations can improve representation to produce better business outcomes is essential.

Salemi agrees, saying that part of the solution is recognizing what gaps exist and where you might be falling short.

“It’s important for employers to realize disparities exist, and so do the perceptions of inequities,” Salemi says. “Awareness is key—awareness of both the lack of women in leadership roles and how to even the playing field and awareness that workers themselves see inequities. There are disparities between genders and their perceptions; resentment can build, too.”

For its part, Kindred says, PagerDuty has used “data-informed decision-making to develop and sustain inclusion and diversity programs that drive employee engagement and belonging and ensure that our teams are motivated to solve complex problems for big customers.”

Half of PagerDuty’s board members are female, and 86% of its employees cite PagerDuty’s social impact investment as making them proud to work there, Kindred says.

“By working closely with teams, we can ensure that everyone has access to opportunities for growth, such as skilling programs for women in coding and development,” Kindred says. “It’s also important that we collectively advocate for change at all levels, including the C-suite, where leadership can be pivotal in driving these efforts. Through collaboration and shared responsibility, we can build a stronger, more inclusive community that can support the diverse needs of our customers and stakeholders alike.”

Supporting employee groups, such as business resource groups and affinity groups, can also help women build strong networks for support and professional development, Washington says. And investing in tailored development opportunities for women by level or role can also “lay the foundation for strong cohorts of women to grow and develop professionally with tactical advice that is relevant to their circumstance,” she says.

Betting on Benefits

Other industry experts say that a lot of it comes down to offering benefits and resources to make sure women are able to thrive in the workplace. For instance, child care and other family responsibilities have historically been barriers for women in the workplace , and they are often reasons why women have stalled in their careers or even left the workforce altogether.

“Women tend to take the majority of the parenting responsibilities, even in a dual-earner household,” says Rachel Sederberg, a senior economist and research manager at Lightcast, a Boston-based labor market analytics firm. “It takes a lot to take on all of those different responsibilities within the household. And that will pull you away from work, especially when your work is a type of job where the longer the hours you put in, the more you’re rewarded. It’s not a punch-in, punch-out, do your shift and leave. It might be something like consulting or the like, where the more you’re in the office, or the more you’re online, the better you’re going to do. So that causes problems.”

Comprehensive benefits that help women—and men—juggle their home and work lives can make the difference. Those benefits include paid parental and family leave, child care assistance, and remote work options.

According to the Monster poll, besides fair and equal wages (cited by 87% of the women surveyed) and a clear vision for the future of their career (68%), the benefits that women value most in the workplace are maternity leave and child care benefits (38%, up 13 percentage points from 2023 when it was 25%), female mentors (35%), and fertility and family planning services (16%).

“Regarding the importance of maternity leave, child care benefits, and fertility and family planning services, companies should be prioritizing and evaluating their benefits plans and improving them,” Washington says. “If organizations offered better support to parents and what they need, women would have greater opportunity to deliver in the workplace on their goals and visions.”

Washington adds that good workplace benefits must include family benefits for men to allow a balance of responsibility for couples, thus allowing women to truly benefit from the offered resources.

Workplace flexibility is also key to the equation. According to a 2022 YouGov survey , 72% of women said they preferred flexible working locations, as compared to 57% of men.

“Employers should ensure that there are reasonably flexible options for all employees, including remote work,” Washington says. “They should implement clear and transparent criteria for promotions, ensure equity-informed decisions that reduce bias, have adequate parental leave policies for both parents, and provide child care assistance via financial support or an onsite child care option.”

Those practices can ensure that women—and working moms in particular—are “provided with the best opportunities to succeed and rise in the ranks as they desire,” Washington says.

To learn more about women in leadership, don’t miss the SHRM Women in Leadership Institute , a multiday event designed to equip you with the game-changing tools to propel you into the next phase of your career. It will bring together more than 2,000 women leaders for an exceptional and results-driven leadership development experience.

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World Economic Situation and Prospects: September 2024 Briefing, No. 184

Introduction: the return of conventional monetary policy

After seeing near-zero interest rates in major economies in the aftermath of COVID-19, the world economy has experienced rapid monetary tightening since early-2022 (UNDESA, 2024a). Persistent inflationary pressures during the second half of 2021 due to stronger-than-expected recovery in demand, and supply shortages (figure 1) brought along the most aggressive monetary tightening in decades. Major central banks rapidly increased short term policy rates and began to reduce money supply and liquidity (figure 2). This rapid monetary tightening in developed economies was echoed in developing economies as well. As a result of this policy, most major economies have managed to bring down inflation without substantially increasing unemployment and triggering a recession. After two years of interest rate hikes, central banks are now shifting towards monetary easing, albeit interest rates will remain elevated compared with long-term averages. In the meantime, higher-for-longer interest rates have long raised questions on the policy’s impact on growth, decades of development gains and improvements in SDG implementation, especially for the least developed countries (LDCs) (UNDESA, 2024b).

Monetary tightening can also affect women by undermining efforts to gender equality represented by SDG 5. Currently, an additional $360 billion in developing countries is needed per year to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment in key global goals (UN WOMEN, 2023). However, past financial crises and associated austerity policies showed that tight liquidity limits the public resources available to promote gender equality (Blanton et al., 2019; Grigoli and Sandri, 2022). While the chances of achieving SDG 5 by 2030 are already slim, diverting resources away from this purpose will further hinder progress towards gender equality and the likelihood of achieving the goal.

Women are economically more insecure

Women’s poverty is often caused by discriminatory conditions in labour markets, limited access to resources and financial assets, and deep-rooted cultural norms that constrain women’s participation in education, decent employment, and decision-making. Therefore, it is key to understand the role of insufficient laws and enforcement of existing laws that regulate women’s work life and protect their economic and social rights. The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law Index shows that the playing field is not level for women and men (World Bank, 2024). Gender bias in laws affect women both in developed and developing countries, but the effects of these biases are most pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (figure 4). Globally, over 3.9 billion women face legal barriers that affect their economic participation. Of 190 economies assessed in 2024, 98 have enacted legislation mandating equal pay for women for work of equal value, but only 35 have adopted pay transparency measures or enforcement mechanisms to address the pay gap. Only 44 per cent of the legal provisions that support the entrepreneurship of women are in place. Twenty-one economies do not grant women equal administrative power over, and ownership rights to, immovable assets, including land. Worldwide, about 23 per cent of countries employ biased inheritance laws, discriminating against widows and daughters specifically.

Impact on labour market outcomes

Women and men’s economic activities differ, which may imply that economic shocks affect them differently. In labour markets, job segregation, differences in labour market attachment and job tenure, concentration in temporary and part-time jobs can serve as transmission channels for gender differentiated effects of monetary policy shocks (Takhtamanova and Sierminska, 2009). In developed economies, women tend to concentrate in sectors less likely to be hit by cyclical fluctuations (such as healthcare, education, and public administration) while in developing countries they are overrepresented in agriculture, and low-skill and low-paid manufacturing jobs. Hence, women in developing countries are more susceptible to macroeconomic shocks. However, the ultimate impact, if any, is context specific as seen in the mixed evidence. Some empirical studies show that the gap between women’s and men’s employment increases during monetary tightening in emerging markets and developing countries (Braunstein and Heintz, 2008; Petreski et al., 2024), whereas some find that the male-dominated sectors are more affected by contractionary monetary policy, which reduces the employment gap in favour of women (Flamini et al., 2023). Others find no significant impact of monetary policy changes on gender gaps in employment in developed countries (Takhtamanova and Sierminska, 2009).

Impact on entrepreneurial activity

Women’s entrepreneurial activities tend to be more sensitive to monetary policy changes due to already unfavourable conditions that they face in access to credit and financial services (i.e., tighter credit markets, and more expensive loan payments). About 80 per cent of women-owned businesses with credit needs are either unserved or underserved which translates to a financing gap of $1.7 trillion for Women-owned Small and Medium Enterprises (WSME) (IFC, 2022). Evidence shows that women entrepreneurs’ business loan applications are rejected to a greater extent than their male counterparts. When they secure a business loan, female entrepreneurs pay higher interest rates on loans than male entrepreneurs (Mascia and Rossi, 2017), the loan is considerably smaller for women (Coleman and Robb, 2009) with higher collateral requirement (Bellucci et al., 2010). Martinello et al. (2021) show that, on average, female business owners pay 98 basis point higher interest rates on their non-mortgage loans. However, even when controlling for everything else, a difference persists in interest rates between female- and male-owned corporate loans of 28 basis points on average.

Impact on savings and debts and financial assets

In addition to its impacts on labour, and income earning opportunities, monetary tightening can affect wealth inequality due to already persistent gender gaps in women’s access to assets – land, housing, and financial assets (Doss et al., 2015; Gaddis et al., 2018). Prices of tangible assets, such as housing, fall when interest rates rise. But even when this happens, high interest rates translate into higher mortgage rates making it even harder for women to access to the finances for purchasing assets or making payments. Financial assets, on the other hand, may receive a heterogenous impact. Women’s participation in financial markets is rather limited due to them being more risk averse, and less financially literate. Even when they participate, they tend to refrain from risky assets (Grazzini and Kim, 2019). Therefore, the falling prices of financial assets translate primarily into portfolio losses for men. Consequently, monetary tightening might reduce the gender financial wealth gap, albeit due to a broader destruction of wealth in the economy.

Unintended consequences of monetary tightening on women

Episodes of high inflation and tight monetary policy to contain it are likely to affect labour market outcomes as business may hesitate to undertake new investments and expand their operations due to economic uncertainty and high borrowing costs. Despite the historical evidence, labour markets remained surprisingly resilient during the recent cycle of monetary tightening in 2022 and 2023 (ILO, 2024). Labour force participation rates increased in several regions in 2023, notably in high-income countries (by 0.3 percentage points) and lower-middle-income countries (by 1.5 percentage points). However, the decline in unemployment rates and increased participation rates mask a significant lack of decent employment opportunities. Many employees face with obstacles to decent work including declining real wage, precarious work arrangement, deteriorating working conditions, and high levels of informal employment (ILO, 2024).

Labour markets in developed countries remained resilient in 2023 and 2024 due to several factors including robust economic activity despite monetary tightening, effective labour market policies, labour hoarding and flexible work arrangements (for example, reduced work hours). The resilience in developing country labour markets, on the other hand, can be largely attributed to informal work arrangements which saw a modest increase since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and surpassed 2 billion people (of which 96 per cent reside in developing countries) in 2023 reaching its highest level in 2 decades (ILO, 2024). Four out of five jobs created for women are in the informal economy, while, for men, this ratio stands at two out of every three jobs (ILO, 2023). Moreover, mean hours worked have not fully recovered from the pandemic (figure 5). Even though they are approaching 2019 levels in certain cases (low-income countries), mean hours worked remains below pre-pandemic levels for both male and female workers, which may affect the overall labour supply over the long run.

In addition, in the medium run, significant monetary and fiscal adjustments are anticipated worldwide which will likely adversely affect labour market conditions (ILO, 2024). Especially, employment growth is likely to slow down as it reacts with a lag to changes in output (figure 6). Disparity in education and skills in the sectors that have boomed in the aftermath of the pandemic, caregiving responsibilities, declining access to decent work are some of the reasons of slower jobs growth for women.

Interest rate increases deepen women’s poverty by reducing their real income. Even though COVID-19 affected mostly men’s jobs, as opposed to women’s, globally job losses (as a share of employment to population) were larger for women at 3.6 per cent compared to 2.9 per cent for men (ILOSTAT). Also, women had to significantly reduce their work hours to take up more caregiving responsibilities. Elevated price level (especially cost of childcare) following the pandemic did not help with them coming back to work force either. Due to reduced working hours or completely withdrawing from the labour market, women face lower real income. Even those who remain in employment see slower wage growth. Wage growth slows down for both women and men during contractionary monetary policy episodes leading to a wider gender pay gap. But evidence shows that women’s wages react more to interest rate hikes. For example, in the United Kingdom, higher interest rates during contractionary monetary policy increased the gender pay gap by 0.8 per cent (Apergis et al., 2019). This is explained by women’s lower bargaining power and already existing pay gaps.

Similar to employment, women’s entrepreneurial activities, too, remained resilient despite increasing interest rates. Indeed, women owned businesses saw a boom in recent years in several countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt. But this should be interpreted carefully. This wave is largely fueled by strong post-COVID support programmes in developed and upper-middle-income countries and may be due to lack of decent employment in lower-income countries. It may also reflect the cost-of-living crisis pushing people to explore new business opportunities to earn some extra cash. As a matter of fact, higher rates continued to negatively impact the existing businesses.

In the United Kingdom, a survey found that 74 per cent of female business owners explained that high interest rates had negatively impacted their business in the second half of 2023. Twenty-five per cent of the participants indicated that difficulty in access to finance was one of the biggest factors (along with inflation and energy costs) negatively impacting their business.

Spillovers to gender gap in developing countries

Rising interest rates in large developed economies make the cost of borrowing and of debt servicing increasingly unsustainable for many developing countries that have borrowed in those currencies. To tackle the debt burden and reduce the fiscal deficit, developing country governments may resort to fiscal consolidation measures, which come at the expense of spending on essential public services. It is estimated that 59 out of 125 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will adopt austerity measures as of 2024, exposing about 2 billion people to the adverse effects of budget cuts (Abed and Kelleher, 2022). For example, in Africa, 43 countries are expected to cut spending on health, education and social protection by $183 billion from 2022 to 2026. Women and girls are disproportionately affected from fiscal cuts as they depend more heavily on public services and social protection measures compared to men due to deep-rooted gender inequalities (Abed and Kelleher, 2022).

Fiscal consolidation measures that cut or freeze the public wages and social transfers undermine women’s income and economic security by increasing their income poverty. Reductions in social transfers (such as conditional and unconditional cash transfers programmes, child benefits, food subsidies) directly impact the real income of women who are more dependent on these compared to men.

In addition, cuts to publicly available and accessible services including health, education, childcare, and infrastructure (i.e., electricity, water and sanitation) indirectly impact the welfare and well-being of women and those who depend on them by increasing women’s time poverty. Women act as ‘shock absorbers’ when cuts in public services or transfers affect those in their care. This was particularly evident during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Both men and women reduced their work hours during the pandemic due to the closure of schools and childcare facilities. However, the burden of intensified childcare and homeschooling activities disproportionately fell on women, leading to a rise in unpaid working time for women. Sixty per cent of women and 54 per cent of men reported that they have increased the amount of time they spend on unpaid domestic work after the pandemic (UN WOMEN, 2020). Globally, women dedicated 4.7 hours to domestic care work in 2023, compared to 1.8 hours for men (OECD, 2023). In other words, women spent 2.6 times more hours on unpaid care and domestic work than men did. The female-to-male ratio of time spent on unpaid care and domestic work in 2023 is the highest for Africa with 4.1, and lowest for Latin America and the Caribbean (among developing countries) with 2.5 (OECD, 2023).

Implications for gender equality and SDG 5

Monetary policy, like many other macroeconomic policies, deals with economic aggregates. In most economies, it pays little attention to distributional issues such as gender inequality. However, the tools of monetary policy can act as a transmission mechanism, and hence, result in a broader impact than merely helping to reduce inflation. Interest rate is one of the key transmission mechanisms of monetary policy to the real economy. Yet, the impacts of monetary policy are not uniform across countries and social groups but are rather complex and context specific. Policy outcomes are influenced by institutional characteristics, type of policy tools, and socioeconomic structure of the society and are borne unevenly between women and men. Therefore, monetary policy should be assessed in broader terms of its socioeconomic impacts, given the specific social context of each country. Moreover, the policy implementation would need to vary by country and according to different economic and financial conditions.

The gender differentiated outcomes of monetary policy are realized due to the different positions of women and men in the economy, both market (paid) and non-market (unpaid) (Heintz, 2015). Restricted education and employment opportunities of girls and women, the feminization of poverty, challenges in access to finance and in accumulation of assets fuel gender inequality which leads to underutilization of skills and talents of almost half of the population and undermines aggregate growth. In other words, gender inequality has an economic cost, and it affects countries’ growth and development with direct implications for SDG 5 that seeks to achieve gender equality for inclusive and sustainable development. Therefore, the ultimate goal must be eliminating gender inequality.

Boosting the economic empowerment of women and reducing their economic vulnerabilities is crucial to this end. Enhancing women’s resilience to shocks requires addressing the underlying reasons for their vulnerability. Cultural norms – often manifested through legal practices – are among the root causes of inequality between women and men, and they determine the gendered impacts of policy outcomes. To eliminate cultural and legal biases against women, governments should accelerate efforts to reform laws and enact public policies that promote gender equality and work to facilitate social change. In tandem, frameworks to support their effective implementation should be established.

In most economies, monetary policy is enacted with a focus on a rather narrow set of goals such as reducing inflation and raising or sustaining growth rates. However, this overlooks the potential of this powerful macroeconomic instrument to promote inclusive and sustainable growth. Monetary policy would be more capable of supporting gender equality if it is supported by other policies and instruments in the macroeconomic, social and legal fields. Finally, having women in leadership and decision-making positions at central banks would also help monetary policy become more gender inclusive.aw 2024. Washington, D. C.

The Monthly Briefing on the World Economic Situation and Prospects is part of the monitoring and analysis activities of the Global Economic Monitoring Branch (GEMB) of the Economic Analysis and Policy Division (EAPD) of UN DESA. This issue was prepared by Berna Dogan under the supervision of Hamid Rashid (Chief, GEMB) and general guidance of Shantanu Mukherjee (Director, EAPD). Andrea Dominovic provided statistical assistance.

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