Gender Equality: Overview

Introduction

Gender equality (also gender egalitarianism) is generally the promotion of equal rights and equal consideration for all genders. Historically, this has mostly taken the form of promoting women's rights in traditionally male-dominated societies. However, there is a competing movement that claims men's rights are being overlooked, and even retracted, and that the main focus of gender egalitarianism is the promotion of women's rights. Strictly speaking, however, gender egalitarians prefer language that does not prefer either gender, since they tend to feel that equality should not require favoring either gender.

Feminism, especially radical feminism, has received its share of criticism for concentrating on women's issues only rather than gender equality. Third-wave feminism, however, concentrates more on equality than its precursors did and avoids the perceived anti-male tone of earlier feminism. In popular culture, for example, it has become acceptable to depict men in a negative light, where once it was acceptable to depict women in the same way. This kind of compensation, say egalitarians, does nothing to advance the cause of gender equality but rather swaps imposed gender roles and reinforces received ideas of misandry and misogyny.

Gender inequities in economic opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political power persisted in the 2020s. Gender gaps varied by race and ethnicity within the United States, as well as by region and nation internationally.

Understanding the Discussion

Affirmative action: Programs designed to combat institutional discrimination in hiring practices and in college admissions by favoring emerging or socially disadvantaged groups. Though quotas are not necessarily part of affirmative action, many employers and institutions of higher education institute them to meet affirmative action requirements. This aspect of affirmative action tends to be the major source of contention on the issue because people mistakenly believe that women or people of color are awarded jobs for which they are poorly qualified, while more qualified White men are passed over, in order to meet quotas.

Egalitarianism: The support of equal consideration for all persons.

Feminism: A compendium of ideologies relating to women's rights, specifically dealing with the necessity of establishing equal rights for women in social, political, economic, legal, and cultural terms. Much of the American feminist movement is based on the idea that the United States is a patriarchal society, though different strains of feminism have different approaches to this perceived problem.

Gender: The identity and roles associated with, and/or appropriated by specific persons, regardless of their assigned sex at birth. Gender roles can and do vary over time and between different cultures. Gender-based discrimination and inequality tend to arise when gender roles are automatically attributed to persons based on their assigned sex at birth.

Masculism: A compendium of ideologies relating to men's rights, from military conscription to fathers' custody rights. Though not necessarily in opposition to feminism, it is generally agreed that masculism arose in response to the changing role of women in society.

Misandry: Hatred of men.

Misogyny: Hatred of women.

Suffrage: The right to vote. Suffrage was one of the first rights sought for women by gender egalitarians and feminists. "Full suffrage" usually means the ability to hold elected office, as well as being able to freely vote in all elections.

History

The source of gender inequality is largely unknown, and potentially unknowable, although there have been several theories on the matter, many attributing inequalities to the differing childbearing capabilities of men and women. Inequality tends to vary with social structure, with early hunter-gatherer societies being more equal than later agrarian societies. Other theorists have suggested that the patriarchal teachings of most of the major religions have promoted the idea that women are inferior to men, and many have noted that these inequalities tend to lessen as countries become more developed.

Sikhism, founded in 1469 in India, is one of a handful of religions that explicitly advocates gender equality. Sikhs reject female subordination in all its forms, including the taking of a husband's name and the paying of a dowry. The Bahá'í Faith also strongly advocates the equality of women, claiming that humankind cannot progress until men and women are given equal respect and consideration and that men will be unable to reach their full potential until women are given equal rights. Nevertheless, Bahá'ís recognize the differences between men and women and ascribe different roles to the genders based on these differences, including the necessity of a dowry and educational preference for women. This latter provision is likely due to the Bahá'í belief that the subjugation of women stems from a historical lack of education for women.

In the early United States, the primary issue relating to gender equality was suffrage. When the country was founded, only property-owning White men could vote. New Jersey was the first state to give voting rights to women, granting suffrage to women who had more than $250 in late 1776. This decision was quickly reversed, however. In 1848, the first women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, resulting in a Declaration of Sentiments, which formed the basis for the women's rights movement. The movement grew quickly, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that women began to be granted full suffrage in individual states, beginning with Wyoming in 1869.

Wyoming's pioneering legislation came in the wake of the formation of two groups that were created with the expressed purpose of attaining suffrage for women: the National Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. The two groups eventually merged, in 1890, to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was signed into law, giving full suffrage to all American women.

In 1921, Margaret Sanger, who founded the first birth-control clinic in the country, founded the organization that would become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Up until 1936, when the law was changed, information about birth control was considered "obscene" and could not be sent through the US Postal Service. Birth control eventually became one of the most controversial issues of the 1940s and 1950s.

President John F. Kennedy formed the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, installing former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as chair. The commission's report on workplace discrimination against women was released in the same year that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, detailing the dissatisfaction and subjugation of American housewives, was published. These events both inspired the modern women's rights movement, resulting in the passage of the Equal Pay Act, requiring that employers pay women the same as men doing the same job, in 1963.

Second-wave feminism, beginning in the mid-1960s, tended to focus on the under-representation of women in the workplace. This was expressed with the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discriminatory hiring practices), and the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest women's rights group in the country, which focuses on battling sexual discrimination. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11375, extending affirmative action hiring policies to include women.

The Equal Rights Amendment, originally drafted in 1923, finally went before Congress in March 1972. The amendment, which would have become the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, read, in part, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Despite passing in Congress, the amendment was never ratified by the requisite thirty-eight states necessary to add it to the Constitution, and it officially died in 1982 (or in 1979, according to some).

While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed discrimination in pay, such discrimination has continued because of loopholes in the laws. One of these loopholes was closed by the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. Lilly Ledbetter worked for the tire manufacturing company Goodyear for nineteen years before she discovered she was paid less than the men she worked with, but because the laws in effect at the time placed a six-month statute of limitations on suing for discrimination—starting with the first act of discrimination—her case was thrown out by the Supreme Court. The new law restarted the clock on the statute of limitations with each new discriminatory paycheck issued by an employer, so that women who received unfair wages were able to sue for back pay, even if they did not discover the discrimination immediately. In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to make it illegal for employers to ask job applicants about their previous salaries before extending a job offer; the state law was introduced as a way to close the gender wage gap, as women’s relatively lower salaries due to gender discrimination can follow them throughout their careers. Furthermore, women in the United States continued to face job discrimination when pregnant despite such discrimination being illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Americans also pushed for paid maternity leave following the birth or adoption of a child as a way of reducing the gender wage gap, which often opens up for women after becoming mothers but does not have the same impact on the wages or career opportunities of working fathers.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, those fighting for gender equality started to be concerned with intersectionality; that is, to be aware that women of color may have different experiences with sexism and face different obstacles to gender equality than White women, and to ensure that feminism as a movement takes this into account rather than treating the experiences of White women as universal. Twenty-first-century efforts to promote gender equality also focused on violence against women, particularly rape and sexual assault; in the mid-2010s, Americans placed an unprecedented level of scrutiny on law-enforcement agencies and universities in their handling of reports of rape or sexual assault. For example, a number of municipal police departments were criticized for having large backlogs on untested rape kits, which would help to identify and apprehend violent sexual offenders.

The media also increased public awareness of particular elements of rape culture, a term that describes environments in which sexual assault and rape are excused and even encouraged through popular culture and social behavior. Awareness of the prevalence of sexual assault and the environments that overlook or tacitly encourage it particularly increased as a result of the so-called Me Too movement, which began in 2017 by encouraging women to share their experiences of assault or harassment (or simply state without elaboration that they had had such an experience) on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #MeToo. (Activist Tarana Burke had previously, in 2006, encouraged women on MySpace to use the phrase in a similar way.) The social media movement gave rise to a broader cultural conversation about sexual assault and rape culture in many countries, including the United States.

Many issues related to gender equality were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in late 2019. A 2021 global analysis of gender equality by the United Nations revealed that women around the world were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, including in areas such as food security, unemployment, education, and health care. According to UN Women, in 2021 about 435 million women and girls were living in extreme poverty around the world, and many countries reported a rise in reports of violence against women and girls during the pandemic. Furthermore, data suggested that women were restricted from working in certain jobs in nearly 50 percent of countries in 2021. Advocates pushed for gender-responsive laws and policies in many countries to help counteract such declines in progress on gender equality and women's rights.

Gender Equality Today

According to the World Economic Forum's annual Global Gender Gap Report, which measures gender disparity regarding economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment, none of the 146 countries indexed by the report had reached full gender parity by 2023. Topping the 2023 index, the countries with the narrowest gender gaps were Iceland, Norway, and Finland; the United States ranked forty-third.

The wage gap between men and women in the US continued to be a problem in the 2020s as well. While the gender wage gap declined from earlier decades, the Institute for Women's Policy Research predicted that, based on the rate of growth in 2015, the pay gap would not close until 2059. Indeed, further narrowing of the gender pay gap has been very slow. The Pew Research Center reported that in 2022, American women earned on average 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, contrasted to 2002 when women earned 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. Further, the US Census Bureau's findings from 2021 indicated that full-time working women made 84 percent of what their male counterparts earned, a moderate increase over 2015 numbers.

It is important to note that the gender wage gap varies among women of different racial and ethnic groups when compared to wages earned by White men. According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), in 2022, Asian American women working full-time earned 99 percent of what White men did; White women earned 74 percent; Black women earned 66 percent; Native Hawaiian women earned 61 percent; Native American women earned 55 percent; and Latina women earned 52 percent.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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