Abstract
Unequal treatment based on gender is deeply embedded in many countries. Gender studies emerged as an important part of academic research in the 1980s. The issue of gender inequality also emerged on the global political agenda, albeit slowly. Gender-related measures became part of the Human Development Index (HDI) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
In 2010, gender was eventually fully integrated in the Human Development Report (HDR) as the Gender Inequality Index (GII). Unlike the HDI, the GII is particularly aimed at exposing differences in achievements between women and men, and at measuring the human development costs of gender inequality. The higher the value of the index is, the greater are the disparities between females and males, and the greater the loss to human emancipation in general.
The GII captures disadvantages facing women and girls, and discrimination in health, education, political representation and the labour market. The GII measures reproductive health (maternal mortality, and adolescent birth rates), empowerment (proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males aged 25 and older with at least some secondary education) and economic status (women’s labour force participation).
A higher value of the UN Gender Inequality Index (GII) indicates greater gender inequality. While gender inequality remains a problem in the relatively more equal societies, it is a major barrier to human development in many developing states.
The worst performing nations are those in the two highest quintiles of the data (index values of 0.45 and above). As shown in the gender equality map, the highest inequalities are found in countries where a substantial part of the global population lives, most notably the African continent and South- and Southeast Asia. The EU average is 0.13, world average 0.45 and Arab States average 0.55.
Men may well suffer as well as women in countries that tolerate greater levels of gender inequality, with their partners more likely to die in childbirth, the male-dominated politics of the country being more aggressive, and men often expected to take on more traditional male roles rather than having greater flexibility. Gender inequality is also geographically more complex than such an index may suggest.
Two examples taken from the GII demonstrate these varying spatial patterns, providing an insight into how gender inequality affects different aspects of society. The two smaller maps show the gender gaps in education and in the labour market as expressed through the ratio of females to males participating in both areas. The education map shows the ratio for the population aged 25 and above with at least some secondary education. South American countries, on average, have high levels of gender inequality but they also, as this map shows, have a high share of women participating in secondary education.
The labour market map shows the ratio for the population aged 15 and above participating in the labour force. Here large parts of the Arab world stand out with a female to male ratio of below 0.5, meaning that more than two men for every woman are participating in the labour market (up to 5.9:1 in Yemen). At the same time, these are not the most unequal countries according to the index.
These two examples show the complexity of gender inequality and that achieving change requires more than just addressing single issues. Global efforts to achieve change include the inclusion of gender equality in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) where goal five aims to ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ by 2030.
Accomplishing the goal of gender equality requires leadership and political action. Yet politics is one of the fields where gender inequality is a major problem. Political participation of women remains overall low, and across the world the number of women in leadership positions is low.
In January 2019, just 11 women were serving as head of state and ten as head of government according to United Nations statistics. An earlier UN study showed that in 2017 only 18.3 per cent of government ministers were women, often with very particular portfolios such as environment, natural resources, and energy, followed by social sectors, such as social affairs, education and the family.
The map of the gender gap in politics shows the 2018 GII data for political representation of women in parliaments worldwide measured by their share of seats in parliament. The Sustainable Development Goals call for ‘women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life’.
Full and effective participation in political life is highly underperforming at a global level, if an approximate equal participation is seen as a desirable outcome. In November 2018, 24 per cent of all national parliamentarians were women. While this still is a relatively low figure, it marks an increase up from 11.3 per cent in 1995. The underlying spatial patterns of the gender gap in politics provide a varying geographical picture. Europe (27.7 per cent) and especially the Nordic countries (42.3 per cent) had the overall highest regional shares of women in parliament. At the same time, there were 29 countries where women accounted for less than ten per cent of parliamentarians and four where no women were represented at all. Only three countries had more than 50 per cent female representation in parliament, Rwanda (61.3 per cent), Cuba (53.2 per cent) and Bolivia (53.1 per cent).
These diverse patterns demonstrate that gender inequality has complex patterns. Political and other forms of empowerment have often proven to be an important step in changing the societal norms that sustain these imbalances. But while these contextual factors have been widely described, Celis and Lovenduski (2018) argue that gender equality needs to be analysed as a power struggle and that such empirical – hence descriptive – studies need to investigate the underlying mechanisms that block the achievement of gender equality.
Footnotes
Benjamin D. Hennig is an Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Iceland and an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Oxford.