How to Close the Gender Gap

Gender inequality is a complex phenomenon that affects all individuals regardless of their country or culture. As a result, it is difficult to evaluate and compare government policies that aim to address gender inequality because they can be implemented in many different ways. In addition, they often reflect the cultural and social context in which they are introduced. Nonetheless, some common trends can be observed in the gender gap across nations.

For example, women are significantly under-represented in top income brackets worldwide. This gap is likely to close slowly as countries develop and adopt new labor-saving technologies. However, the pace of convergence is still too slow to achieve full equality.

This is not because of the lack of policies to reduce gender inequality, but rather because of the cultural and economic constraints in which governments operate. As a consequence, it is important to identify the most effective strategies to close the remaining gaps and assess the tradeoffs between them.

A major problem is that global inequality estimates based on unweighted country averages give too much weight to small countries, thus underestimating the contribution of their populations to world trends. In the case of global gender inequality, this results in slower declines in gender gaps than would have been the case with uniform population growth (see Table 2 for examples).

Fortunately, the availability of gender-discriminatory data is improving. The chart above presents the latest available estimates of gender gaps for the OECD countries. The “Add country” button allows you to compare the gaps with other national statistics.

The underlying cause of the gender gap is that women are less likely than men to be able to participate in economic activities. As a result, they are less able to earn incomes that can support them and their families. In turn, this can lead to poverty or dependence on welfare programs. This is why addressing gender inequality is such an important priority for governments around the world.

One of the main challenges in closing the remaining gaps is that they tend to be more implicit and subtle, reflecting norms that prevent people from acting on their own beliefs and preferences. This can make them harder to address than more visible forms of inequality like the pay gap or female representation in politics.

Fortunately, there is evidence that social norms can be changed through education, for instance by encouraging parents to talk openly about their views on gender and by providing children with role models who challenge prevailing stereotypes. In fact, a study of school-based gender equality programs found that they have a strong impact on attitudes among students, especially boys. In addition, some interventions, such as those that involve adolescent girls and boys in classroom discussions about gender inequality for two years, are also showing promising results in changing norms. These types of interventions can help close remaining gaps and create a more equal world in which all humans are free to fulfill their potential without being held back by restrictive norms.