The Unequal equals
Over the years women had to fight monsters and swim oceans to enjoy the basic birth rights their counterparts enjoyed without a sting. Today, we have come a long way, we see woman strive hard to break the conventional narratives. Have we truly overcome all our challenges? Have we genuinely achieved equality? Is the real question.
While some brag about the considerable advancements made in fundamental rights of women across the world and question the necessity for the debate over equality, world organizations through their reports, give us a reality check. The “Global Gender gap report” released by the world economic forum declared that woman worldwide would have to wait 131 years to achieve equality in various sectors including economics, politics, health, and education. The overall gender gap closed by a mere 0.3 percent compared to the previous year.
This gap exists and persists through these years, partly because of biased gender social norms and undervaluation of women’s capabilities and rights in society. It outlines shocking figures such as nine out of ten men and women hold biases against women; only 28 percent of managerial positions worldwide are held by women; 28 percent people believe that university is more important for men than for women.
Achieving higher human development does not always guarantee women’s empowerment and gender equality. Similarly, access to basic education and financial inclusion does not automatically ensure equality. This misunderstanding often leads to questioning the importance of gender equality. unravelling multiple layers of the societal norms and psychological conceptions becomes a necessity for achieving equality.
Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize win holds great significance in understanding gender dynamics within labor markets. It casts a spotlight on the gender lens necessary for comprehending individuals’ participation in the labour market and their choices regarding occupation. In her research on the factors affecting women’s participation in the labour force, Claudia identified a U-shaped relationship between GDP per capita and women’s involvement in the workforce. This trend indicates that both low-income and high-income countries typically show high rates of female labor force participation, while middle-income countries tend to have lower levels of women’s engagement in the labor market.
This U- shape typically indicates that the increase in economic growth results in a decline in women’s labor force participation initially, but with substantial increase in per capita income, there is an increase in women’s labor force participation. These initial decreases and the substantial rise in labor force participation is linked to the structural reform of the economy from a typical agrarian society to a service-oriented society.
The structural shift is not the end, the social and biological constraints that women face to sustain and contribute to the economy throughout their life cycle. Goldin’s work highlights the constraints of re- entering job market post childbirth, which was alleviated to a certain extend after the widespread availability of birth control pills.
Despite the increased participation of women in the labor force across nearly all developed countries, a persistent gender pay gap persists. Eradication of pay gaps requires more efforts than just concentration on the “Pay,” it requires change in the nature of the work, to involve women that are disadvantaged by the long hours of work.
More often women tend to be drawn down by the societal stigma and conditioning, which plays a vital role in restricting them from participating and sustaining in the economy. Women no longer wish to be or ought to be flag bearers of sacrifice, as a rational economic society would require more than just a “rational man.”