Gender equality

• 1. Introduction

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  Gender equality is described as the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender, and the equal valuing of different behaviors, aspirations, and needs. It is the fifth of seventeen sustainable development goals of the United Nations, listed as SDG 5. UNICEF, an agency of the United Nations, frames it this way. Women and men, and girls and boys, enjoy the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections. That same definition is careful about what equality is not. It does not require that girls and boys, or women and men, be the same, or that they be treated exactly alike. So how did a Quaker offshoot in north-west England end up partnering every elder with an eldress? Why does the United Nations measure inequality every single year? And what does a billion women locked out of bank loans have to do with $28 trillion? The answers run through religion, law, health, money, and the way a culture decides who counts.

• 2. The First Practitioners

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  Christine de Pizan, writing in her 1405 book The Book of the City of Ladies, argued that the oppression of women rests on irrational prejudice. She pointed to numerous advances in society probably created by women. Centuries before the word existed as policy, she was building a case. The Shakers, an evangelical group, turned the idea into daily structure. They practiced segregation of the sexes and strict celibacy, and they branched off from a Quaker community before emigrating to America in 1774. In 1788, Joseph Meacham, head of the Shakers' central ministry, had a revelation that the sexes should be equal. Meacham brought Lucy Wright into the ministry as his female counterpart, and together they restructured the society to balance the rights of the sexes. Each elder, who handled the men's spiritual welfare, was partnered with an eldress, who did the same for women. Each deacon was partnered with a deaconess. Men had oversight of men. Women had oversight of women. After Meacham's death in 1796, Wright led the Shaker ministry until her own death in 1821. The arrangement outlasted both of them by a wide margin. Shakers maintained the same pattern of gender-balanced leadership for more than 200 years. In 1859, Shaker Elder Frederick Evans stated the belief forcefully. He wrote that Shakers were the first to disenthrall woman from the condition of vassalage to which all other religious systems consign her. Evans and his counterpart, Eldress Antoinette Doolittle, joined women's rights advocates on speakers' platforms throughout the northeastern U.S. in the 1870s. A visitor in 1875 noted that a zealous advocate of women's rights might here find a practical realization of their ideal.

• 3. Conventions And Treaties

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  The movement toward gender equality in wider society began with the suffrage movement in Western cultures in the late-19th century, which sought to let women vote and hold elected office. That period also brought significant changes to women's property rights, particularly around marital status, seen in the Married Women's Property Act 1882. Starting in 1927, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union enforced gender equality within Soviet Central Asia during the Hujum campaign. Since World War II, a thicket of international agreements has grown up around the idea. The Convention against Discrimination in Education was adopted in 1960. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, known as CEDAW, was adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly. It has been described as an international bill of rights for women, and it came into force on the 3rd of September 1981. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action was adopted by consensus at the World Conference on Human Rights on the 25th of June 1993. The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women followed that same year. In 1994, the twenty-year Cairo Programme of Action was adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development. It asserted that governments have a responsibility to meet individuals' reproductive needs, rather than demographic targets. Also in 1994, the Belem do Para Convention in the Americas called for the end of violence and discrimination against women. At the close of the Fourth World Conference on Women, the UN adopted the Beijing Declaration on the 15th of September 1995. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted on the 31st of October 2000, deals with the rights and protection of women and girls during and after armed conflicts. The Maputo Protocol, adopted by the African Union, came into force in 2005 and guarantees comprehensive rights including an end to female genital mutilation.

• 4. Money And Work

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  Almost a billion women cannot obtain loans to establish a company or open a bank account to save money. That single fact reframes the whole debate as an economic one. Increasing women's equality in banking and the workplace might boost the global economy by up to $28 trillion by 2025. The gap shows up in pay. Across the European Union, women continue to hold lower-paying jobs and earn 13% less than men on average. According to European Quality of Life Survey and European Working Conditions Survey data, women in the European Union work more hours but for less pay. Adult men, including the retired, work an average of 23 hours per week, compared to 15 hours for women, yet women continue to earn around 25% less than men. The term Pink Tax, also known as Women's Tax, describes gendered pricing where products or services marketed to women cost more than similar ones marketed to men. Studies have found that women pay about $1,400 a year more than men due to gendered discriminatory pricing. Funding has started to flow against these gaps. The European Investment Bank established the SheInvest program in 2020 with the goal of raising one billion euros to help women obtain loans and run enterprises across Africa. At the Finance in Common Summit at the end of 2022, the European Investment Bank funded an additional two billion euros in gender-lens investment in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Conscription marks one corner where formal inequality runs the other direction. Only a few countries, for example Norway and Sweden, have gender-equal rules for mandatory conscription.

• 5. Marriage And The Law

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  In Switzerland, married women's rights were severely restricted until 1988, when reforms abolishing the legal authority of the husband came into force. Voters had narrowly approved those reforms in a 1985 referendum, with 54.7% in favor. Switzerland was one of the last countries in Europe to establish gender equality in marriage. In the Netherlands, full legal equality between husband and wife arrived only in 1984. Before then, the law said the husband's opinion prevailed over the wife's on matters like children's education and the family domicile. Until the 1970s, legal subordination of married women was common across European countries, through marriage laws that handed legal authority to the husband. In 1978, the Council of Europe passed Resolution (78) 37 on equality of spouses in civil law. In the United States, a wife's legal subordination ended through Kirchberg v. Feenstra, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana Head and Master law that gave sole control of marital property to the husband. Everyday law lagged behind. In Australia, until 1983 a husband had to authorize a married woman's application for a passport. Africa saw a run of reforms. Namibia abolished the marital power of the husband in 1996 with the Married Persons Equality Act. Botswana abolished it in 2004 with the Abolition of Marital Power Act, and Lesotho in 2006 with its own Married Persons Equality Act. Other places held firm. In Iraq, paragraph 41 of the criminal code states there is no crime if an act is committed while exercising a legal right, and husbands have a legal right to punish their wives. In 2010, the United Arab Emirates Supreme Court ruled that a man may physically discipline his wife and children as long as he leaves no physical marks. In the Philippines, the Magna Carta of Women, Republic Act No. 9710, was signed on the 14th of August 2009 by then-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, affirming women's rights as human rights.

• 6. Health And Harm

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  The World Health Organization points to women not being allowed to travel alone to a hospital, and women prevented by cultural norms from asking husbands to use a condom, as social norms that harm women's health. The same lens reveals harm to men. Among European men, non-communicable diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and diabetes account for the vast majority of deaths of men aged 30-59, often linked to behaviors stereotyped as masculine, like heavy drinking and smoking. Teenage boys suffer accidents from social pressure to impress peers through risk taking. Some harms are ritualized. Female genital mutilation is the ritual cutting or removal of some or all of the external female genitalia, rooted in inequality between the sexes. UNICEF estimated in 2016 that 200 million women have undergone the procedure. UNFPA and UNICEF call it a manifestation of deeply entrenched gender inequality, persisting because it is treated as a rite of passage, a prerequisite for marriage, or a religious belief. An estimated 125 million women and girls living today have undergone it across the 29 countries where data exist, about half of them in Egypt and Ethiopia. Violence against women is gender-based, committed against women because they are women. In countries where gang murders and civil unrest are rare, the vast majority of murdered women are killed by partners or ex-partners. Richard A. Posner writes that traditionally, rape was the offense of depriving a father or husband of a valuable asset, his wife's chastity or his daughter's virginity. Killings of transgender individuals, especially transgender women, continue to rise yearly. The year 2020 saw a record 350 transgender individuals murdered. The Human Rights Campaign tracked over 128 fatal cases against transgender people in the US from 2013 to 2018, of which eighty percent involved a trans woman of color.

• 7. Education And Power

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  About two thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women, the United Nations Population Fund states. The consequences ripple outward. Higher levels of women's education are strongly associated with lower infant mortality, lower fertility, and better outcomes for their children. Progress can be rapid and then reversed. In Afghanistan, girls' primary completion rose from 8% in 2000 to 56% in 2020, though the gender gap remained at 20 percentage points, and girls have since been banned again from secondary schools. In some provinces, such as Uruzgan, just 1% of girls completed primary school in 2015. A 20 percentage point gender gap in upper secondary education also shows up in sub-Saharan African countries including Chad and Guinea. Political power tilts the same way. Only 22 percent of parliamentarians globally are women, so men continue to occupy most positions of political and legal authority. As of November 2014, women made up 28% of members of the single or lower houses of parliaments in European Union member states. In 2015-61.3% of Rwanda's Lower House of Parliament were women, the highest proportion anywhere in the world. It was one of only two such bodies where women held a majority, the other being Bolivia's Lower House of Parliament. Forced marriage shadows girls' development. UNFPA states that over 67 million women aged 20-24 in 2010 had been married as girls, half of them in Asia and one-fifth in Africa. The agency projects that an average of 15.1 million girls a year will be married starting in 2021 until 2030 if present trends continue.

• 8. The Acceleration

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  Nearly US$40 billion was pledged in Paris in July 2021, when the Generation Equality Forum announced a Global Acceleration Plan for Gender Equality. The Forum was convened by UN Women and co-hosted by the governments of Mexico and France. Its five-year action plan runs through 2026, with targets set through six Action Coalitions and a Compact on Women, Peace and Security. The timing carried weight. It arrived 25 years after the 1995 Beijing Conference, and as the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected women and girls through caregiving burdens, job losses, and violence during lockdowns. Institutions were being built in parallel. In 2010, the European Union opened the European Institute for Gender Equality in Vilnius, Lithuania. In September 2020, a coalition of scientific organizations established the Standing Committee for Gender Equality in Science to promote equal access for women and girls to science education and careers. Recognition, though, often stops short of action. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reviewed agricultural policy documents from 68 countries. Over 75% recognized the roles or challenges of women in agriculture, but only 19% set gender equality or women's rights as clear policy objectives, and just 13% explicitly encouraged rural women to take part in policy-making. Public sentiment, by contrast, leans clearly one way. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey across 38 countries found a global median of 65% who believe it is very important that women have the same rights as men, a number the pledges and committees are still chasing toward 2030.