On Women’s Day: About 90% of world population biased against women

The new Gender Social Norms Index – released by the UNDP – measured how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in areas like politics, work, and education, and contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population.

This new analysis reveals that, despite decades of progress closing the equality gap between men and women, close to 90 percent of men and women hold some sort of bias against women, providing new clues to the invisible barriers women face in achieving equality, and a potential path forward to shattering the Glass Ceiling.

According to the index, about half of the world’s men and women feel that men make better political leaders, and over 40 percent feel that men make better business executives and that men have more right to a job when jobs are scarce.

Moreover, a new report by UN Women found out that the climate emergency, conflict and the alarming rise of exclusionary politics all threaten future progress towards gender equality.

According to the report, along with the economic costs of the climate crisis, a rise in displacement, and forced migration, poverty and insecurity will have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including through greater exposure to abuse and violence.

The statistics are stark; although 39 percent of women currently work in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sector, just 14 percent of agricultural landholders are women. Men are 75 percent of parliamentarians, hold 73 percent of managerial positions, are 70 percent of climate negotiators and almost all of the peacemakers.

The UNDP called on governments and institutions to use a new generation of policies to change these discriminatory beliefs and practices through education, and by raising awareness and changing incentives. For instance, by using taxes to incentivize fairly sharing child-care responsibilities, or by encouraging women and girls to enter traditionally male-dominated sectors such as the armed forces and information technology.

Female stars saving planet not enough to change world standpoint on gender equality: 

Women – with young women like Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, Uganda’s Vanessa Nakate and Peru’s Maria Alejandra Rodriguez Acha at the forefront – are using their voices to demand action to reduce carbon emissions, to include youthful and female voices in climate decision-making and to raise awareness of the damage humanity has done to the planet.

Women are increasingly participating in building on the existing body of science on climate and advocating for the environment; the Unied Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Champion of the Earth laureate Katharine Hayhoe dedicates her life to quantifying the effects of climate change and transforming public attitudes, while Joan Carling also a Champions of the Earth laureate, has defended the rights of native and marginalized peoples for over two decades.

In Brazil, Anna Luisa Beserra is creating innovative and sustainable technologies for water treatment and solid waste management, and Nepal’s Sonika Manandhar ‘s Green Energy Mobility platform (GEM) aims to make electric public transportation a quality alternative to private vehicles to combat climate change.

Kenya’s Wanjuhi Njoroge founded #SaveOurForestsKE, a campaign that raised awareness about the decimation of forests and led to a nine-month ban on national forest logging in the country.  Looking ahead, she said, “we have a huge opportunity of creating employment and dealing with unemployment rates if we looked at climate action as a business and every day, I am inspired by the potential that climate action has of creating enormous wealth.”

As the lead organization to coordinate environmental matters within the United Nations System, UNEP has the responsibility to model good practice and drive the achievement of gender equality goals in all its activities, including assessments and analyses, norms, guidelines and methods. Guided by its medium-term strategy for 2018-2021, all UNEP policies, programs and strategies during period “will incorporate a gender lens” using integrated gender responsive approaches.

Achievements realized so far in gender equality:

25 years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action set out a clear path on how to achieve gender equality, the world has witnessed some progress.

More girls are in school than ever before and more countries have reached gender parity in school enrollment.

Maternal mortality has fallen by 38 per cent between 2000 and 2017.

Over three quarters of countries now have legislation to tackle domestic violence.

However, the Report of the UN Secretary-General on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action points out that violence against women and girls remains pervasive.

And the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) ‘Tackling Social Norms: A game changer for  gender inequalities’ study says that progress towards gender equality is, in fact, slowing. At present, only 14 percent of women and 10 percent of men worldwide have no gender social norm bias.