Gender Equality: Losing Ground

The Facts: Stalled Progress

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022 (World Economic Forum, 2022) it will take 132 years to close the gender gap to equality. As Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, says in the Preface of this report, “In 2022, amid multi-layered and compounding crises including the rising cost of living, the ongoing pandemic, the climate emergency and large-scale conflict and displacement, the progress towards gender parity is stalling and the risk of reversal is intensifying” (p. 4). Only 30 of the 145 economies covered in the report registered progress in closing the gender gap by at least one percentage point while the rest of the nations’ economies are stalled or reversing the closure of the gender gap.

In their research, sociologists Paula England, Andrew Levine, and Emma Mishel (England et al., 2020), set out to update past descriptions of trends in gender equality in the United States. They did this by examining changes in multiple indicators of gender equality for the period of 1970 to 2018 such as employment, educational attainment, segregation of fields of study, segregation of occupations, and pay. They found that the percentage of women ages 25 to 54 who are employed rose continuously until 2000 when it reached its highest point to date of 75%. However, between 2000 and 2018, this percentage decreased to a high of 73% in 2018, thereby decreasing by 2%. They also found that, although the ratio of women’s to men’s pay increased from 0.61 to 0.83 between 1970 and 2018, it rose especially quickly in the 1980s, but much more slowly since 1990. The authors concluded that while there has been progress in the movement toward gender equality, “our updated and broadened analysis strongly reinforces a conclusion a number of scholars have reached recently: that progress toward gender equality has slowed in recent decades, and on some indicators has stalled completely” (p. 6993).

More evidence of the stalled progress toward gender equality comes in the United Nations (2020) report The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics, in which the authors found that in the world as whole, less than 50% of working-age women are in the labor market, a figure that has barely changed over the last quarter of a century. Another finding in this report is that unpaid domestic and care work falls disproportionately on women, restraining their economic potential. In terms of power and decision making, the finding was that women held only 28% of managerial positions globally in 2019—almost the same proportion as in 1995. And only 18% of enterprises surveyed had a female

Chief Executive Officer in 2020. Among Fortune 500 corporations only 7.4%, or 37 Chief Executive Officers, were women.

In political life, while women’s representation in parliament has more than doubled globally, it still has not crossed the barrier of 25% of parliamentary seats. Out of the 193 member states of the United Nations, only 28 women serve as elected Heads of State (UN Women, 2022). At a meeting on September 21, 2021, between women Heads of State and Government and Mr. Abdulla Shahid, the President of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, Mr. Shahid said:

The necessity of this meeting is evident when we consider the statistics. At our current rate of progress, it could take 300 years to achieve gender equality. We must act now. Accelerate investment in girls and women. Scale up efforts to empower women. Expand opportunities for girls. Eliminate gender-based violence.

It’s not just the statistics that are troubling—it is also the misconceptions and perceptions of where women stand on gender parity. While there is no question that tremendous advances in gender parity have been made, these advances depend on such elements as the time frame, sector, age group, or country measured. In some countries gaps in education have closed, health access is equal, and many countries have increased the number of women in political leadership.

But as Liswood (2022), Secretary General of the Council of Women World Leaders points out, people look at all the programs in place in government and corporations for the advancement of women and so believe that progress must be happening in the face of all these efforts, even when the data and facts contradict the so-called progress. Intent becomes confused with impact and effort is confused with outcome.

In the United States, a nationwide poll conducted in 2020 by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs found that 72% of Americans incorrectly believed that the United States Constitution guarantees men and women equal rights under the law (Associated Press & NORC, 2020). Thus, another obstacle is convincing women that, in reality, they don’t have legal rights they think they already do. As background, the United States is the only democracy in the world that does not have women in its Constitution. Women’s rights are not enshrined in the Constitution other than in the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The word “woman” does not even appear once in the document. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by a two-thirds vote and gave the states until 1979 to approve it as the 28th amendment to the constitution. Passing of this amendment would give permanent and guaranteed equality to all genders and a legal basis for abortion rights, protection of all marginalized genders, enshrine LGBTQ rights and same sex marriage, and gender parity in pay, education, and health care access.

Unfortunately, 50 years has passed, and the ERA has yet to become the law of the land. The requisite number of states failed to ratify the amendment by 1977 but subsequently three states approved the ERA long after the initial deadline—Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020 and the ERA had the 38 ratifications necessary for it to become the 28th Amendment. The proponents of the ERA are now fighting to revive the amendment on multiple fronts. But there are a number of legal obstacles to this revival ranging from time extensions, states withdrawing ratification, and publication of the contents of the proposal by the National Archivist. The ERA also faces opposition from conservative activists who see it as endangering their stances on abortion and transgender rights.

The 28th amendment rectifies a crucial omission in the US Constitution. A country’s laws set the tone for how it treats its people, and how its people treat each other. When laws discriminate on the basis of gender, cultural inequality, discrimination, and violence against women and girls are legitimized and become endemic. Currently in the United States, women and girls are protected only through judicial decisions and a mixture of state laws which can be inconsistent and often ascribed to different ideologies. True gender equality in the United States can and should finally be secured by the passing of the 28th amendment.