Closing the Gaps in Gender Inequality

Despite the progress in eliminating discrimination against women, the world still faces significant gaps in gender equality. This is due to a variety of causes. Gender inequality is not just about relegating women to inferior roles, but it also undermines economic growth and development. Closing the remaining gaps will require more targeted and focused policies.

Efforts to reduce gender inequality have been successful in areas such as education, health care and labor market participation. However, it is difficult to understand and explain why progress has stalled or even reversed in other areas, such as the gap in women’s representation in parliament and senior management positions.

The main causes of these gaps are both cultural barriers and gender bias, which create a preference/comparative advantage for men over women in many dimensions of life. For example, women are less likely to be educated and have more unpaid work outside the home because they are viewed as “feminine” or “necessary” for household chores and child rearing. In contrast, men are generally able to work more hours than women and are seen as “masculine” or “necessary” in some jobs and industries.

These cultural barriers and gender bias are difficult to overcome, but tackling them can be done by educating people about the harms of discrimination and changing mindsets. An important step in this direction was taken with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which aims to raise awareness and provides states with a set of rights that they are obliged to enforce.

Another factor is that reducing gender inequality may be perceived as a zero-sum game from an economic point of view. In other words, lower levels of gender inequality may lead to more unpaid work by women and a reduced labor force participation rate for men. However, the evidence is clear that societies benefit from advancing gender equality, which leads to better health, education and economic performance for everyone, regardless of gender or social class.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to addressing gender inequality through laws and policies, this approach is not enough. Specifically, policies must address the root causes of the remaining gaps, which are not always readily apparent or easy to isolate from other factors.

Gender inequality in education, fields of study, workplace discrimination, and the distribution of jobs across sectors and pay all require specific and targeted policies. The paper surveys levels and trends in these dimensions of inequality and makes recommendations on what needs to be done to accelerate the decline in remaining gaps. It also emphasizes the need for more analytical work that is geared toward separating the impact of general and targeted policies on gender inequality. The results of such efforts should be used to inform future policy making. This will require a more fine-tuned approach to measuring gender inequality, including the development of indicators that take into account changes in household structure and labor supply.