Gender equity: Articles

Leaders need clarity on what works to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. This 2023 report shows success factors that contributed to significant, quantifiable, scalable, and sustainable DEI impact.

Gender equity and environmental sustainability may seem like unrelated issues, but research shows that they are in fact closely intertwined. Women and other underserved groups are disproportionately impacted by the global climate crisis, but they are also uniquely positioned to lead the fight for sustainability. In this piece, the authors offer six strategies to help business and political leaders empower women and address environmental challenges through an intersectional approach to sustainability.

This analyses assess whether laws that promote gender equity and freedom from violence are associated with a lower risk of prior-year physical and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) among adolescent girls and adult women (AGW) and whether these laws protect more and less vulnerable AGW equally.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are three closely linked values held by many organizations that are working to be supportive of different groups of individuals, including people of different races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, genders, and sexual orientations.

Some companies are taking effective steps to bring more women to their senior management ranks. They are doing away with persistent myths that blame women and stall their careers. Allyson Zimmermann discusses concrete examples of how businesses are moving from awareness to action.

Gender parity is not recovering, according to the Global Gender Gap Report 2022. It will take another 132 years to close the global gender gap. As crises are compounding, women's workforce outcomes are suffering and the risk of global gender parity backsliding further intensifies.

As of January 2021, nearly 3 million women had dropped out of the workforce. The “Shecession” has naturally led many to a focus on recapturing pre-pandemic levels of female engagement in the job market. But why settle for merely recapturing what you already had when your organization can do more? Why not use the efficacy of remote work and the priorities of high-talent women seeking employment to reset your company’s gender diversity and inclusion at all leadership levels? The authors offer three ways to do this.

How and why do societal, organizational and individual factors affecting gender equity in the IT field change over time? To answer this question a longitudinal investigation of the nature of change in factors affecting the position of women in the IT profession was undertaken. It was conducted in Ireland against the backdrop of fluctuations in the nation’s socio-economic status.

This paper attempts to shed light on three transversal issues that national governments and the European Commission should bear in mind when implementing the European Pillar of Social Rights: civil rights; labour relations; and gender equality. The analysis departs from the setting of the current model of welfare state in post-World War II Europe and it ends with the Porto Summit 2021, reflecting on the documents approved and what they can mean for a post-COVID-19 Social Europe.

This article employs real-time household data to study the impact of the pandemic lockdown on paid and unpaid work in Spain. It documents large employment losses that affected more severely low-skilled workers and to some extent college educated women. It shows that the pandemic resulted in an increase in the gender gap in total hours worked, including paid and unpaid work.

Even in contexts of gender parity, people who identify as men comprise a modest to bare majority; in administrative and other leadership positions, men comprise a broad majority and are thereby unavoidably a plurality of those involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion centred policy change efforts. Paradoxically, men’s advocacy for gender-equity often unintentionally conveys gendered biases.

The return to the workplace offers a unique opportunity for male leaders to prioritize gender equity, especially when it comes to work-life commitments. Women have traditionally done more unpaid work at home and take more time off for caregiving. Although companies offer parental leave and flexible work options to help working parents, men have often not taken advantage of these benefits, leaving the perception that they’re just for women and reinforcing biases that limit women’s careers.

To make progress toward gender equity, men need to be involved. But zero-sum bias often deters men from engaging in the conversation (let alone taking action) because it fuels the belief that men must sacrifice their resources or stature for women to earn a place at the table. Although zero-sum thinking is invalidated by the data, it pervades the workplace equity narrative.

The on-going COVID-19 pandemic has generated negative socio-economic consequences for women and girls at many levels. Many are facing a surge in gender-based violence, exacerbated by conditions of confinement, overcrowding and growing socio-economic insecurity. Despite various lockdowns, women continue to be at the forefront of the struggle, carrying out essential tasks in their capacities as nurses, midwives, domestics, janitorial workers and care-takers. Although they are risking their own health and safety, the work they perform continues to be undervalued and underpaid.

Occupational gender segregation is a worldwide phenomenon. Research from Western regions such as the United States and Europe shows that the observation of occupational gender segregation can perpetuate gender stereotypes (social role theory; men are ascribed agentic traits, whereas women are ascribed communal traits). However, predictions from social role theory have not been well‐tested in non‐Western nations. In a study with 1,918 participants from 10 nations systematically differing in gender inequality, we investigated the extent to which target men and women in gender‐segregated occupations are associated with stereotype‐relevant traits.

While gender equality is simply focused on providing men and women with the same equal opportunities (like making it legal for women to own land, or even attend school), gender equity works to correct the historical wrongs that have left women behind (such as societal restrictions on employment). Gender equity also means giving women the tools to succeed, like programs that offer conditional cash transfers to women. A focus on equity bridges the gaps in equality through laws and policies and gender-focused programs that don’t just level the playing field, but also work to change the culture to be more supportive of women.

Drawing on participatory feminist, diverse economies and strengths based approaches, this article outlines a research methodology for developing community‐based indicators that recognises women's and men's participation and relationships in all spheres of life, including the ‘non‐economic’.

This article argues that the popularity of unconscious bias training invites agencies to view this practice as a ‘silver bullet’ to achieve gender equity, but that its effectiveness is likely to be limited unless accompanied by sustained interventions to address discrimination. Further, the impacts of unconscious bias training need to be rigorously evaluated to assess whether government resources are being effectively utilised.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and multiple natural disasters, the sustainable development agenda has regained popularity, although the meaning of the term "sustainable development" remains contested. Focusing on the social-environmental nexus of sustainable development, this article considers the relationship between gender equity and the environment before turning to one of the most popular interventions for gender equity in the developing world, microfinance.

The four papers are part of a set of reports examining the issue of gender equality in the EU. They relate gender inequality to other indicators such as family situation and socio-economic factors as well as education considerations. The reports find that mothers in western European countries continue to have a lower rate of employment and work less hours. Gender disparities exist especially between parents and non-parents. This interlinks with long-standing social norms that perpetuate gender inequality in employment - the male partner as the sole earner remains the dominant household model across Europe.

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender-based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, this article assessed parental-leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identified as women; 5,062 identified as men) across 37 countries that varied in parental-leave policies and societal gender equality.

In times of societal change, like changes in gender roles, one may compliment men deciding to spend more time on childcare, or women pursuing a job higher up, to support their pioneering behaviour. However, this article predicts that while compliments may communicate appreciation of someone's behaviour, they simultaneously communicate that a norm has been breached, and thus that the behaviour is not considered ‘normal’.

Women's lower career advancement relative to men is sometimes explained by internal factors such as women's lower willingness to make sacrifices for their career, and sometimes by external barriers such as discrimination. In the current research, positing a dynamic interplay between internal and external factors, we empirically test how external workplace barriers guide individuals' internal decisions to make sacrifices for the advancement of their careers.

Despite changes in their representation and visibility, there are still serious concerns about the inclusion and day-to-day workplace challenges various groups face (e.g., women, ethnic and cultural minorities, LGBTQ+, people as they age, and those dealing with physical or mental disabilities). Men are also underrepresented in specific work fields, in particular those in Health care, Elementary Education, and the Domestic sphere (HEED). This article proposes an approach to understanding barriers to workplace equality that highlights four key aspects: (1) the different (often subtle) potential triggers of identity threat in the workplace for members of stigmatized groups; (2) the ways in which members of stigmatized groups cope with these threats; (3) the role of supportive factors that mitigate potential threats and affect self-regulation; and (4) potential hidden costs for the self or others of what appears at first to be effective self-regulation.

Intensive mothering norms prescribe women to be perfect mothers. Recent research has shown that women’s experiences of pressure toward perfect parenting are related to higher levels of guilt and stress. The current paper follows up on this research. Firstly, it examine how mothers regulate pressure toward perfect mothering affectively, cognitively, and behaviorally, and how such regulation may relate to parental burnout. Secondly, it examines how feeling pressure toward perfect mothering may spill over into mothers’ work outcomes.

The current study investigates how descriptive and prescriptive gender norms that communicate work and family identities to be (in)compatible with gender identities limit or enhance young men and women’s family and career aspirations. Results show that young adults perceived gender norms to assign greater compatibility between female and family identities and male and work identities than vice versa, and that young men and women mirror their aspirations to this traditional division of tasks.

While women are increasingly entering traditionally masculine, agentic occupations and roles, there has been less of a shift in the opposite direction: men moving into traditionally feminine, communal occupations and roles. This paper outlines the negative consequences of men's low communal engagement, and how this inhibits various benefits for men themselves, for the women and children around them, and for society as a whole.

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