Progress on Female Gender Roles Hits a low as Per a Research
The outlook towards women and their role, be it home or society, started changing during the 1950s.
Inclusion of the women as part of the development of the country all over the globe in the past hundred years has only lead to overall growth. Governments all over have made efforts to reduce inequality between men and women, protect the rights of the women and to empower women not with just growth as the core aspect, but for justice as well. But after the initial spurt towards bringing about equality between women and men the progress has been at a snail’s pace and in some cases it seems to have even reversed.
There seems to be a slowing down in the progress being made towards gender inequality in the past few years despite all the efforts that have been put by the country leader and by the women. Gender inequality is seen in the nature of the work, pay, the basic facility, education, ownership of property. The changes towards gender equality were at quite an accelerated rate during the 1970s and the 1980s. But the scenario changed since 2000. There was a drop in the level of equality. In US, the participation of women in the workforce rose from 44% in 1962 to 74%in 1990 to 78% in 2000. It dropped to 76% in 2010, showing a slowdown and even a reversal of the trends. UK is also experiencing a reversal in the movement towards gender equality. In these economically advanced nations the women are still getting paid less than the men for the same job.
The Global Gender Gap Report
The World Economic Forum releases an annual The Global Gender Gap Report, it reflect the gender based disparities based on indicators such as economic participation, education, political empowerment, and health. The 2012 report included 135 nations in the analysis, covering 90% of the world’s population. It showed countries like Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Norway as the highest ranking nations where there has been a closing of the gender gaps. Largest economies like United States, China, Japan and Germany showed an improvement but the progress has been slow. The 2014 report shows India slipping to the position of 114 out of 142 nations. It is severely lagging behind in parameters such as economic participation, education and health. Though, it has shown great progress in political empowerment. India has had female heads of government over the years. Japan has been ranking amongst the lowest in the gender gap analysis primarily because of lack of political empowerment though the percentage of educated women in Japan is high and it also scored high in the health index.
Reasons for Slow Progress
High level of violence against women, lack of access to credit and refusal to let women participate in political arena and decision making roles are the main reasons universally for the slow progress. From the social stand point it is being said that the children suffer when the mother is a working woman and this has been a discouraging factor for women to go out and seek work.
According to a study conducted by McKinsey reasons attributed to the slow progress being made in redressing the situation of gender inequality was the lack of initiative and commitment to cause from the top management and also the negative effect that maternity leave and parenting responsibilities on salaries and career growth. It was further stated that bringing out gender equality is work in progress, after the initial initiative, there has to be a sustained effort and monitoring over a period of years. Another factor that bogs the working women down further is the added burden of taking care of home. The work –life balance of a woman is entirely different from that of a man. There are fewer women who are able move up in the career ladder because they have to take care of their children causing the career progression of women to be slow and with interruptions.Working women in Japan are facing high level of discrimination at work especially when they are pregnant or when they come back from maternity leave. During the years of global recession women faced loss of jobs, which led to further deepening of the problem. In countries like Mexico 70% of the women were laid off.
The International Monetary Fund made suggestions to all the nations to amend laws and follow the taxation policy where individual income is taxed rather than family income. This was to encourage women to continue to work. The IMF also asked the developing nations to provide education to women and also proposed to the countries to have paid parental leave for both the parents and provide affordable child care facilities.
Christine Lagarde , Managing Director, IMF also said that other than discrimination as one of the primary factors behind women slow career progression, the women themselves are also responsible as they don’t fight for “higher salaries and bigger bonuses in performance reviews”.
In the book, Lean In, the author Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, states that, “Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.”
The Human Development Index in its report mentions “that efforts to improve women’s lives by ensuring equal pay, providing decent parental leave, tackling the harassment and the social norms that exclude so many women from paid work. Only then can the burden of unpaid care work be shared to help women to enter the labour force”
In the words of Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Center for International Development, “In countries where women have more schooling than men, the frontline for change has shifted to making marriage and motherhood compatible with fuller economic and political participation of women”.
Blog Author
