Gender Equality

Your guide to gender equality

Gender equality is the theoretical state of equanimity between men and women or boys and girls. Because nearly all societies have been male-dominated historically, certain inequalities have had to be addressed in order to bring about greater equality. For example, it was not until the twentieth century that women won the right to vote in Western democracies. As such, it is often viewed through the lens of a long-standing campaign, which, to feminists, is known as the women's movement. It should be added, however, that men and women are now not seen by many as the only two possible genders and – for some, at least – gender equality must also mean equality of rights for third-gender, trans-gender, and non-binary individuals.

Calls for greater gender equality have been around for centuries from writers like Christine de Pizan and Mary Wollstonecraft. That said, it was not until the suffrage movement in the nineteenth century that significant steps towards gender equality occurred in the West. Married women were the first to win important property rights following various campaigns. Voting rights among propertied women came later. Many women entered the workforce for the first time during World War I, but it was after the cessation of World War II when many of the de facto rights women have won in wartime were put into law. These were championed in the newly formed United Nations, which included various conventions, for example, in rights to education.

Scholars collect various forms of data to measure gender equality or, more likely, measures of inequality. These include things like how long females spend in education compared to males within certain societies. Another measurement might be the gender pay gap that exists in nearly all countries. There again, the number of reported acts of violence against women is often also used to measure inequality, especially in legal outcomes before the courts. Such data is gathered in a variety of ways and then number-crunched to produce indices of gender equality. The gender-related development index and the global gender gap index are just two examples of them.

Various human rights bodies have made equality of many kinds part of their remit. The United Nations holds that gender equality is a fundamental human right. However, it does not guarantee that this can be achieved under any of the aforementioned indices. Rather, the human right spoken of is the right to the potential for equality. In other words, individuals can challenge discrimination based on gender under their human rights, but this won't necessarily change systemic or institutional gender inequality for all.

While there have been great strides in gender equality in recent decades, some parts of the world remain very one-sided. Although many hope that greater equality will occur as societies progress, few of us doubt that there is a long way to go still.