Nearly 90 per cent of men and women hold some biases against women: UN report

TORONTO -- A new study from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says that nearly 90 per cent of both men and women still hold biases against women in some form.

“The world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030,” the report states, referring to goals the UN had adopted in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The 2020 report sheds light on how the invisible barriers keeping women from achieving equal opportunities and treatment in society are supported by negative biases ingrained in both men and women.

• Equality for women remains a distant goal: UN report

Using the Gender Social Norms Index, (GSNI), which looks at data collected by the World Values Survey from 75 countries, which accounts for 81 per cent of the global population, the report found that “91 percent of men and 86 percent of women show at least one clear bias against gender equality in areas such as politics, economic, education, intimate partner violence and women’s reproductive rights.”

It added that “almost 30 per cent of people agree it is justifiable for a man to beat his partner.”

“We have come a long way in recent decades to ensure that women have the same access to life’s basic needs as men,” Pedro Conceição, head of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office, said in a press release. “We have reached parity in primary school enrollment and reduced maternal mortality by 45 per cent since the year 1990.

“But gender gaps are still all too obvious in other areas, particularly those that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality. Today the fight about gender equality is a story of bias and prejudices.”

In the data collected, around 24 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men recorded only one instance of bias. But the disparity between the views of men and women increased the more biased a person was. While approximately 42 per cent of women globally were found to have biases against gender equality on at least three of the topics, 55 per cent of men held three or more biases.

“Globally close to 50 percent of men agree men should have more right to a job than women,” the report said. “This coincides with the fact that professional women currently face a challenge in finding a partner that will support their career.”

These biases aren’t just private thoughts that individuals entertain occasionally. The data shows that they have impacts on the real world. Countries where more biases against gender equality were recorded also had a bigger difference between the amount of unpaid domestic chores men and women did, with women shouldering more of the burden.

The report said that across the world, “almost 50 per cent of people say they think men make better political leaders, while more than 40 per cent feel that men make better business executives.”

It added that assessments like these are not based in fact, but are “a social judgement, just for being a woman, an invisible barrier and an affront to fairness and real meritocracy.”

PROGRESS VS. POWER

Concrete progress has been made in the changing of laws and policies to uplift women worldwide in regards to enrollment in primary school, maternal healthcare and access to political participation, among others.

There have also been several breakthrough movements in women’s rights recently, the report acknowledged, mentioning things such as the #MeToo movement, the #IWillGoOut movement in India that addresses women’s safety in public, and a movement started in Chile in which thousands of women sang along to a song called “a rapist in your way,” which demanded that the blame for sexual violence stop being placed upon the shoulders of victims.

The tricky thing about measuring the progress of equality is that as disadvantaged groups slowly gain basic rights, there remains a “power gap,” the report said.

An example they gave that exemplified this was the results of more political participation. In countries where women can vote -- which has gone up over the last 25 years -- women and men tend to vote in roughly equal numbers. But this doesn’t always correlate to more women in higher forms of public office.

“The higher the power and responsibility, the wider the gender gap—and for heads of state and government it is almost 90 per cent,” the report says.

This is likely a reflection of the biases that still exist in both the male and female population, reinforcing negative stereotypes about women’s capacity to handle power. Women also represent only 21 per cent of the world’s employers, according to the report.

“Women today are the most qualified in history, and newer generations of women have reached parity in enrolment in primary education,” the report states. “But this may not be enough for achieving parity in adulthood.”

“One example: In the 50 countries where adult women are more educated than men, they still receive on average 39 per cent less income than men—despite devoting more time to work,” the report pointed out.

The report states it would take 257 years to close the economic opportunity gender gap.

The data also indicated that there is evidence in some countries of a troubling rise in backlash against women gaining more equality. The percentage of men who showed no bias against gender equality rose in Chile, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands, but the number of men with no bias fell in Sweden, Germany, India and Mexico .

HOW TO FLIP THE SCRIPT

The report said that policies need to address the root of the problem in order to properly make change.

“Policies can target social norms directly,” the report said. “Changing unequal power relationships among individuals within a community or challenging deeply rooted gender roles can be achieved through education, by raising awareness or by changing incentives.”

The report pointed to Quebec’s nontransferable parental leave for fathers, introduced in 2006, as an example of shifting incentives, because the policy incentivized fathers to become more involved in childcare.

“With new benefits fathers increased their participation in parental leave by 250 per cent, contributing to reverse the social norm that expected mothers to take sole responsibility for care work.”

Policies like these can help even out the imbalance in childcare duties, but currently only half of the countries in the world offer paternity leave as well as maternity leave, according to the report, and half of those offer fewer than three weeks for fathers.

“The work that has been so effective in ensuring an end to gaps in health or education must now evolve to address something far more challenging: a deeply ingrained bias –among both men and women -against genuine equality,” said Achim Steiner, administrator of UNDP, in the press release. “Current policies, while well intentioned, can only take us so far.”

The report is based on research collected in 2019 for the Human Development Report, UNDP said. It was put together as part of the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a course of action adopted by the UN in 1995 aiming to advance the cause of equality for all women.

There are limits to the UNDP report. It only investigates gender social norms as they affect men and women, with no investigation of the various gender identities that exist between and beyond those words.

The report also fails to address the way that transgender men and women are impacted by gendered social expectations, and how transmisogyny affects trans women in particular, despite there being ample evidence that trans women often face higher levels of gendered violence than cis women.