This contribution for Political Insight (June 2019, Volume 10, Issue 2) maps gender inequality around the world and argues that the political sphere is often the most resistant to change. 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).
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Gender Inequality in the European Union
How are the EU member nations faring in the fight for gender equality? It is a complex task to measure the progress that has been made in achieving equal gender rights. The Sustainable Development Goals provide a framework for the global level that is targeted at the most pressing issues of gender based discrimination. In addition to that, national governments as well as trans-national organisations such as the European Union have started concerted efforts to better understanding progress that is made in the different areas that relate to gender equality. This is often linked to developing new policies that aim to improve the situation in the different areas where gender issues matter.
The European Institute for Gender Equality has developed a Gender Equality Index that provides a measure for comparing member states over time in a range of areas relevant to European policymaking. The advantage of using an index is the possibility to use a single measure to monitor and track overall progress between the different countries. The combination of different indicators therefore does not prioritise a single issue of gender rights, but aims to support overall progress as an integrated challenge for achieving real change in thinking.
Global Gender Gap in Secondary Education
100% Equality was the theme of a session at this year’s Nexus Europe Youth Summit in London last week. As a member of the panel I started off by giving a global overview of the state of gender (in)equality and how this is being measured by different institutions, such as the United Nations Development Programme, the World Economic Forum, or the European Institute for Gender Equality. While they draw very different pictures in their detailed indicators, there are also a lot of similarities, with the European Nordic countries almost always being in the top spots of the overall index, which does not mean that in any of these countries absolute gender equality has been achieved. Globally seen, health equality is furthest progressed, why empowerment and participation remain amongst the most pressing issues.
The following map is from my slides that I have shown and displays the gender gap in secondary education around the world projected on an equal-population projection using a gridded cartogram transformation:
Global Gender Inequality
The unequal treatment of individuals based on their gender is a deeply rooted problem in most societies. It started becoming an important part of academic research in the 1980s. The issue of gender inequality also became in various measures part of the Human Development Index (HDI), the annual report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and was eventually integrated as the Gender Inequality Index (GII) in the 2010 report. It is designed to measure the loss of achievement within a country caused by gender inequality.
Women in Parliament
Make it happen is this year’s theme of International Women’s Day. The day is Internationally the day is celebrated every year on March 8th since 1911 and in 1917 demonstrations in the context of the Women’s Day lead to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. What had started as a socialist event to recognize women’s economic, political, and social struggles and achievements has now lost this ideological connotation. Today it is rather regarded as an opportunity to raise awareness for the inequality women still experience in all societies.
In some countries the day is still an official holiday, such as in Russia and other former socialist republics, but also in Afghanistan, Angola and Eritrea. In China, Madagascar, Macedonia and Nepal it is a holiday solely for women.
Gender inequality remains a pressing challenge globally and is seen as a major barrier to human development which is why the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) has a specific indicator to take these problems into account. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) measures gender (in)equity in health, education, work and politics.
The following map shows one indicator from the current GII that highlights the political representation of women in parliaments worldwide measured by the share of seats in parliament (with data for 2013). The map uses an equal-population projection which gives every person on the planet an equal amount of space:
China’s gender gap
“In recent decades, the world has witnessed the enormous economic, social, cultural and political development of China. As the most populous country in the world, China’s transition process influences directly one fifth of the world’s population and indirectly almost all the rest of the world. Chinese economic activities cover the whole globe, Chinese living overseas constitute the largest diaspora, and China’s political and economic influence is significant. On the other hand, China and its government face many challenges, as Chinese society as well as the environment are affected by these massive processes.” These challenges were the theme of a Conference on the Socio-Economic Transition of China at Palacký University in Olomouc (Czech Republic) where the opportunities and potential threats for China are discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective organized by the CHINET (Forging a scientific team and international networking in the field of Chinese Studies) project.
Part of that was an invited contribution which I prepared in collaboration with Adam Horálek of Palacký University. Our talk titled ‘Mapping Perspectives of Changing China’ presented a global as well as national context to the topic, framing China’s socio-economic place in the globalised world and highlighting some of the trends that started transforming the Chinese society considerably over the past three decades. While the most recent Census is not yet available in larger detail, we focussed on an analysis of some key aspects of the previous Census in more detail (and also discussed the quality and reliability of data from official statistics there).
The following map showing the gender gap was part of our slides (see below) and stands for one of the demographic challenges and existing tensions in the contemporary society. These are not only characterized by the changing age structures (with very distinct geographic patterns of ageing populations), but also by the considerable imbalance between the male and female population in most parts of the country. According to the most recent 2010 Census, this was at 1.18 males per female, and thus increased to the already high ratio that was stated 10 years before. In some regions, there are now over 130 men for 100 woman, with the fear (and sometimes reality), “that the excess will lead to increased sexual violence, general crime and social instability” (quoted from the Guardian). It is very much a man-made problem as in the early 1980s the ratio was at 108:100 and therefore only slightly above the natural rate, after which the 1979 introduced one child policy started having an effect that we see in its full extent today. This map, showing the sex ratio on an equal population projection (a gridded cartogram transformation where each grid cell is resized according to the total number of people in an area). It reveals, that the surplus of men is common throughout the country, while the opposite (a considerable surplus of women) is true for very few of the populated spaces in China (such as in the Shenzhen area of the Pearl River Delta where female migrants are the majority of workers under precarious employment conditions).
The authorities appear to become aware of the emerging problems, and according to the Guardian article, China’s “new Five Year Plan sets an ambitious target of cutting the ratio to 112 or 113 by 2016”. For the time being, the pattern in this map remains prevalent and puts pressure on a society that is feeling the full impact of China’s transformation to a new global player over the past decades.
