For just a moment, think back to the history of your family. Think specifically about the women in your family. Did they have access to education? Did they finish primary, post-primary or tertiary education? Think about the consequences of their educational opportunities or the lack of them.
Think about the consequences for those women, for their families, communities, and countries.
If I honestly reflect on these questions across my broader family network, my dominant thought is of the sacrifices made by many women and of the opportunities they were denied (but which were often available to men). Men routinely stand tall because they are standing on the shoulders of women.
This is a worldwide reality to the present day. According to the World Bank, just 10 countries from a total of 195 worldwide - Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Sweden accord women the same economic and legal rights as men. For all other states (including Malta), women were afforded fractions (less than 100%) of the rights of men.
These rights should not be confused with reality as the gap between legal provision and realisation in daily life is, as we all know, immense. Successive UN, NGO and independent research reports across all world regions highlight the fundamental reality that no country has yet achieved gender equality.
On average, across the world, women have just three-quarters of all legal rights afforded to men. Despite all the hype about equality and about how the ‘tables have turned’ (to the supposed ‘disadvantage’ of men), discrimination against women remains the dominant reality.
Admittedly, things have improved over the last 50 years. But the pace has been either extremely slow, static and, in some cases has even regressed. Improvements have been highest in high-income OECD countries, in Latin America, and the Caribbean. Yet in 2020, in some 20 countries women continued to have just half or even fewer of the legal rights of men - mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Hundreds of millions of women continue to experience discriminatory laws and practices simply because they are women. Such laws and practices deny or threaten women’s fundamental human rights, and their security. They limit opportunities, life chances and education – the latter a fundamental tool of empowerment.
The respected UN The World’s Women 2020 report highlighted that in the contexts of power and decision-making, women held only 28% of managerial positions worldwide in 2019 – almost the same as in 1995. Just 18% of enterprises reviewed in 2020 had a female CEO while among the Fortune 500 companies, just 7.4%, or 37 CEOs were women. In formal politics, while women’s Parliamentary representation has more than doubled globally, it had still not crossed the barrier of 25% of seats in 2020. The representation of women at cabinet level while quadrupling in the last 25 years, remains well below parity at just 22%.
By contrast, women remain overrepresented in the ‘caring’ professions, in health and education as well as in unpaid domestic work (in the latter by a factor of seven over men in some contexts).
For centuries, rigid and entrenched beliefs and cultures have been welded into male and female identities. An unholy stew of cultural psychobabble, distorted history and religious fundamentalism manufactured and then sustained gender-based inequality.
If the education of women is fundamental to their empowerment, to equality in society and to future overall human development, then there is a corresponding fundamental in the education of men, especially young men, and boys.
Most of the serious literature on the roots of gender inequality points to early childhood, family, schooling, and socialisation as the key platforms in which many of our gender default settings are rooted. And it is here that, to a significant degree they must be challenged and reset. If the problem starts with childhood, so does the potential solution.
Culture, society, and education are all too often the seedbed where gender inequality, discrimination and conflict are sown. Deformed and damaging masculinity and the misogyny (or hyper-masculinity) it breeds become so embedded that great men and women rarely recognise it.
In the wake of International Women’s Day 2023, it should be a source of great individual and collective discomfort and dismay that across the world, a woman remains, on average, just 75% of a man in legal terms. We are all implicated.