I was so, so happy to see that so many people in my class focused on gender inequality and all-around girl power for their final papers/projects. Gender inequality is a serious problem that I still do not think has garnered enough attention. Although there have been many great changes made, there is still much to be done. For example, in my last post I talked about gender inequality in sports, and in my research paper I talked about gender inequality in college and how it allowed for men to speak on behalf of women in the student-run newspapers. Although my paper specifically talked about the inequality that happened in the 1960s-1980s, gender inequality in sports is something that is still happening today.
Women and girls are also discriminated against in health, education, political representation, labor market, and more, with negative repercussions for the development of their capabilities and their freedom of choice.
Some ways that they are discriminated against are…
- American women serving in Iraq or Afghanistan are more likely to be raped by a comrade then killed by an enemy
- Women with full-time jobs still earn only about 77 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings
- African-American women earn 64 cents and Latina women earn 56 cents for every dollar earned by a Caucasian man
There is an inequality index that calculates these disparities. The GII measures gender inequalities in three important aspects of human development: reproductive health (measured by maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rates), empowerment (measured by proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males aged 25 years and older with at least some secondary education), and economic status (expressed as labor market participation rate of female and male populations aged 15 years and older). It aims to better expose differences in the distribution of achievements between women and men. It measures the human development costs of gender inequality, so the higher the GII value the more disparities between females and males and the more loss to human development.
Hopefully, one day girls truly will be able to run the world, and the GII will be at the fine number of zero.
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Image 1: http://giphy.com/gifs/girls-i-know-that-19yH2r3Y1eeic