Reasons to Be Optimistic About the Future of Gender Inequality
Gender inequality is a global issue that affects every aspect of human life. Although women have made progress in many areas, such as education, violence, and work opportunities, substantial gaps persist. Despite these disparities, there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of gender equality.
It’s important to recognize the complexity and nuance of gender inequality, which can be difficult with the limited data available. Gender inequality is about more than just male vs female, it’s about social class, race, culture, sexuality and disability, all of which are connected. In order to make progress in reducing gender inequality, it’s necessary to understand all of these factors and how they affect the lives of different individuals.
One of the biggest reasons that gender inequality continues is because of the unequal distribution of household responsibilities between men and women. Globally, women perform 12.5 billion hours of unpaid labor in the form of caregiving and other household chores each year, compared to just over 3 billion for men. This unpaid labor subsidizes the economy, fills in for social services, and means that women have less time to spend on paid employment.
Similarly, women are less likely to have access to credit and other financial resources. This can have a domino effect, limiting their ability to invest in themselves and the family’s economic future. Women can also be more at risk of poverty because of lower wages and limited job opportunities, and they tend to live with poorer health outcomes than men.
While there are signs of progress, a lot more needs to be done to ensure that the global goal of achieving gender parity is reached by 2030. A key area that needs to be focused on is ensuring that women’s equal rights to quality education and a decent income are fully achieved.
The Global Gender Gap Index (GII) is a measure that looks at how well countries are doing to close the gap between men’s and women’s achievements in three categories: education, economic empowerment and work, and reproductive health. The GII provides country rankings in each of these categories, as well as an overall ranking. The GII aims to measure the magnitude of gaps between men’s and women’s achievements, the cost of those gaps, and how closing those gaps can benefit society.
Many of the efforts to achieve gender equality have focused on trying to attract and retain girls and women in traditionally male dominated fields like STEM, finance and construction. However, these efforts often overlook the fact that women’s experiences within these industries can be very varied and that a ‘one size fits all’ approach will not work (McKinnon, 2022).
It is also common for initiatives to view women as a monolithic group of people who are broken and need fixing. This misguided belief leads to a one size fits all approach to interventions and change, which is not only ineffective but can have counterproductive effects (Tzanakou, 2019). It’s time to recognize that it’s systems and structures that need to be changed, so they no longer continue to sustain the deep and persistent gender inequality we see across the world.