Gender Equity

Any drawing of a child doing an activity they enjoy, with the accompanying sentence, is a strong response.

It is not fair when people say football is only for boys, because girls can play just as well and they love it too.

Malala Yousafzai is a young woman from Pakistan who fought for the right of girls to go to school. When she was a child, the Taliban banned girls from attending school in her region. Instead of staying silent, Malala spoke out publicly — and was shot because of it. She survived and continued her campaign, becoming the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Her story matters because it shows both how much some people value education, and how far some will go to stop girls from having it.

It is tempting to think of gender inequality as primarily a problem of attitudes — of sexist individuals whose prejudice, if corrected, would produce a fair society. But this view is insufficient. Gender inequality is deeply embedded in the structures of society: its laws, institutions, economic systems, and cultural norms. Individual attitudes matter, but they are both shaped by and expressed through these structures. To address gender inequality seriously, we must address the systems that produce it.

The evidence for structural inequality is substantial. In most countries, women earn less than men on average — not simply because individual employers are sexist, but because occupations dominated by women are systematically valued less than those dominated by men, and because women disproportionately carry unpaid care work that limits their ability to participate fully in the labour market. These outcomes persist even in countries with strong anti-discrimination laws, suggesting that legal equality alone is not enough.

Political representation offers another example. Women make up over half the world's population but hold, on average, around 26% of parliamentary seats globally. This is not only because voters refuse to elect women — research shows that when women stand for election, they win at similar rates to men. The barrier is earlier in the process: women are less likely to be selected as candidates, less likely to have the financial networks needed to run, and more likely to face harassment that deters participation.

However, individual attitudes are not irrelevant. Structural change is often slow without a shift in culture and values. The laws that have expanded women's rights were won by individuals who challenged prevailing attitudes. And the attitudes of individuals — employers, voters, teachers, parents — shape outcomes even within unchanged structures. Individual and structural change must go together.

The concept of intersectionality adds further complexity. Gender inequality does not affect all women equally. A wealthy woman in a high-income country faces different — and generally fewer — structural barriers than a poor woman in a low-income country, or a woman from a marginalised ethnic group. A fully structural analysis must account for how gender intersects with class, race, and other identities.

In conclusion, gender inequality is fundamentally a structural problem, though individual attitudes both reflect and reproduce those structures. Lasting change requires both — reformed institutions and policies, and a cultural shift in how gender is understood and valued.

Intersectionality is the idea, developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, that different aspects of a person's identity — such as gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality — do not operate independently but overlap and interact, often creating forms of disadvantage that cannot be understood by looking at any single identity in isolation.

A first example: a white woman and a Black woman may both face gender discrimination, but they do not face the same discrimination. The Black woman is likely to face additional barriers related to race that compound her gender disadvantage — she may be paid less, face greater barriers to promotion, and be subject to stereotypes that combine racial and gender bias in specific ways. If we only look at gender, we miss this compounding effect.

A second example: a disabled woman may face barriers that a non-disabled woman does not — in accessing healthcare, in being taken seriously in the workplace, and in public spaces. Her experience of gender inequality is shaped by her disability in ways that a single-axis analysis of gender cannot capture.

Intersectionality therefore helps us design better policies. A gender pay gap analysis that does not account for race or disability will produce partial solutions. Truly equitable outcomes require understanding the full complexity of people's identities and experiences.