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8 comebacks to 8 common criticisms of the gender pay gap

The only comebacks you'll ever need when dealing with a textbook Gender Pay Gap Denier.

By Lara Robertson

We’ve all been there: whether you’re having a heated discussion about gender equality in a Facebook comments section, or at the local pub, someone jumps in with a statement that is just so outrageously untrue that you need a killer comeback. (It’s not just men. Women do it too.) However, we’re not always on top of our game when such a moment arises, so we’ve put together a list of responses to eight common criticisms of the gender pay gap argument.

“If women were paid less than men everyone would be hiring women”

Fortunately, most employers don’t actively discriminate against women when when hiring or negotiating pay. However, the prevalence of unconscious bias means that both male and female employers are less likely to hire women , perceiving them to be less competent and reliable than men. Even when a woman is hired, she is usually offered a smaller starting salary than a man with the same credentials, and she is less likely to receive a pay rise or promotion.

“Women shouldn’t choose lower-paid jobs if they want to be paid more”

Although progress is certainly being made, women still face barriers to entering higher-paid, male-dominated industries such as STEM and finance. This ranges from being discouraged from studying certain subjects, to facing discrimination during the hiring process. It’s an interesting phenomenon that female-dominated industries such as childcare, teaching, nursing and social work are among the lowest-paid industries, while male-dominated industries are among the highest-paid. In fact, this is no coincidence. A key study conducted between 1950-2000, when the number of women in the workforce greatly increased, showed the average pay of the now female-dominated industries drastically decreased. This suggests that “women’s work” is greatly undervalued in society.

“Women aren’t being discriminated against. They’re just having children”

There’s no doubt that much of the gender pay gap can be attributed to the fact that women often take time off work or leave the workforce to start a family. However, women face what is known as the ‘motherhood penalty’ , which is a form of discrimination. When women in their twenties and thirties go for a job interview, they often face invasive questions about whether or not they’re planning to have children, which affects their likelihood of getting the job. Even worse, women who try to return to work after having a child find they are much less likely to be hired than childless women, childless men and fathers.

“The gender pay gap isn’t about discrimination”

Actually, a 2019 study by KPMG revealed gender discrimination is the single most significant component contributing to pay inequality in Australia.

The study found it accounts for 39 per cent of the pay gap, a jump from 29 per cent in 2014.

Other factors related to the gap include years not working due to interruptions, part-time employment and unpaid care and work.

The study found the economic impact of closing the gap is equivalent to $182 million each week.

In February 2023, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released data showing the national gender pay gap had dropped to 13.3%. In money terms, in Australia women earn, on average, 87 cents for every $1 earned by a man.

“Women just need to be more assertive”

Although women have been told to ‘lean in’ and become more assertive when it comes to putting their hand up for opportunities at work, negotiating salaries and asking for promotions, the reality is even when they are assertive, research out of the UK found they are 26 per cent less likely to succeed than men. Even worse, showing assertiveness can have a negative effect on a woman’s career trajectory, as their employer may start viewing them as being “too pushy”.

“Men are more logical, while women are more emotional”

Although women’s tendency to be more empathetic than men is often used to justify their prevalence in care giving industries such as nursing and teaching, a study by Harvard Business Review found that they actually also rank higher than men in 17 out of the top 19 leadership qualities including problem-solving and communication skills. So perhaps men are not ‘better’ than women in certain areas, and vice versa – maybe they’re just not given the same chances to succeed. In the 21st century, it’s time we stopped boxing people into outdated gender stereotypes. Just as men can be empathetic, women can also be logical. Men and women should have the same opportunities to pursue whatever career they want.

“People should be hired based on merit, not gender quotas”

If people were hired completely on their merit, you would probably see about a 50/50 split in most industries. Unfortunately, employers tend to hire based on an applicant’s perceived merit (unconscious bias comes into play here), which means many perfectly capable women are often overlooked in favour of a male applicant. Gender quotas have been criticised for privileging women on the basis of their gender, potentially creating negative outcomes for women who are seen by other employees to have been hired for their gender, rather than their merit. However, an experiment undertaken by The Conversation found that if employees were educated about gender discrimination in the field, quotas can help eradicate the biases that shape hiring decisions and encourage more women to put their hand up for a position.

“Women should just work harder”

If someone actually has the audacity to throw this one at you, the best thing you can do is laugh in their face and show them the following study. Gartner’s Global Talent Monitor measured the “discretionary effort” male and female employees are putting in at work. The data showed women were putting in a 7 per cent higher discretionary effort than their male colleagues.

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Why Aren’t We Making More Progress Towards Gender Equity?

• Elisabeth Kelan

Research on how “gender fatigue” is holding us back.

Despite many of the advances we’ve made toward gender equality in the past few decades, progress has been slow. Research shows that one reason may be that many managers acknowledge that the bias exists in general but fail to recognize it in their daily workplace interactions. This “gender fatigue” means that people aren’t motivated to make change in their organizations. Through ethnographic studies and interviews across industries, the author identified several rationalizations managers use to deny gender inequality. First, they assume it happens elsewhere, at a competitor, for example, but not in their own organization. Second, they believe that gender inequality existed in the past but is no longer an issue. Third, they point to the initiatives to support women as evidence that inequality has been addressed. Last, when they do see incidents of discrimination, they reason that the situation had nothing to do with gender. Until we stop denying inequality exists in our own organizations, it will be impossible to make progress.

Organizations have worked towards achieving gender equality for decades. They’ve invested resources into developing women’s careers. They’ve implemented bias awareness training. Those at the top, including many CEOs, have made public commitments to make their workplaces more fair and equitable. And, still, despite all of this, progress towards gender equality has been limited. In fact, many managers struggle to recognize gender inequalities in daily workplace interactions.

• EK Elisabeth Kelan is a Professor of Leadership and Organisation and a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow at Essex Business School at University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

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Opposition to gender equality around the world is connected, well funded and spreading. Here’s what you need to know about the anti-gender movement

By Kate Walton, for CNN  

Editor’s note: This story is part of As Equals , CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. For information about how the series is funded and more, check out our FAQs .

Over the past several decades, in every part of the world, hard-won strides have been made towards equality of access, opportunity and outcome for women and girls. Though less universal, there have also been important legislative and cultural shifts to recognize LGBTQ+ people and protect them from discrimination. But a backlash is growing and spreading.   

From the US to Uganda, comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in schools, sexual and reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights have all come under attack.   

Researchers of this phenomenon refer it as the “anti-gender movement” and warn it threatens women’s rights, gender and sexuality diversity, and democracy itself.  

So, what is the anti-gender movement? Here’s what you need to know.  

What is the anti-gender movement?

The anti-gender or anti-rights movement is an umbrella term that refers to social movements mobilizing opposition to what they call “gender ideology,” “gender theory” or “genderism.”  

Though no singular definition exists for these terms, in practice, these movements are opposed to the same things, which the United Nations identified as the rights of LGBTQ+ people, “reproductive rights, sexuality and gender-sensitive education in schools, and the very notion of gender.”

International Womens Day 2024: 30 people defending women’s and LGTBQ+ rights around the world

The authors of a 2020 UN Human Rights report entitled “Gender Equality and Gender Backlash,” identify three specific conservative groups who are behind these movements: governments, religious groups, and civil society groups. Together, they have formed “national and transnational alliances with shared strategies and objectives.”  

While their exact targets and arguments vary, proponents of anti-gender ideology generally agree that the concept of ‘gender’ is dangerous because it is changing the way our societies are structured. They view “traditional” social units – such as the male-headed nuclear family of a husband, wife, and children – as the only true or moral way to live.  

An LGBTQ+ activist walks past anti-gay rights protesters holding placards, after a ruling by Kenya's High Court to uphold a law banning gay sex, in Nairobi, Kenya, on May 24, 2019. Baz Ratner/Reuters

Notably, anti-gender movements are also connected to the political shifts being witnessed around the globe, away from liberal democracy and towards right-wing populism. As Hungarian historian Andrea Pető  puts it : “The anti-gender movement is not merely another offshoot of centuries-old anti-feminism but is a fundamentally new phenomenon that was launched for the sake of establishing a nationalist neoconservative response.”   

The potential gains that come from playing on fears brought on by societal changes have added anti-gender rhetoric firmly to the political playbook. Donald Trump, who once celebrated the inclusion of transgender women in his beauty pageant, is now campaigning for president by vowing to “ defeat the cult of gender ideology ” and protect children from “left wing radical racists and perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth.”  

Where in the world has anti-gender ideology gained the most traction?

The anti-gender movement is now present in almost all countries around the world, and the number of people supporting it is growing. This poses a significant challenge to not just advancing human rights protection, but also to retaining the gains already made.  

Let’s take a look at some of the countries where the anti-gender movement has been most successful:  

In the US, reproductive rights are being rolled back, following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe V. Wade in 2022, which had protected the constitutional right to abortion for decades. Risa Kaufman, Director of US Human Rights at the Center for Reproductive Rights, described this decision as a “devastating setback.”   

In front of the US Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, abortion rights activists react to the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling which overturned Roe v. Wade. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Meanwhile, hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ+ people – especially transgender people – have been introduced in state legislatures in recent years. At least 510 anti- LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in 2023, a new record according to data from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and nearly three-times the number were introduced in 2022. By the end of 2023, 84 bills were signed into law in 23 states.

“Anti-gender movements are connected to the political shifts witnessed around the globe, away from liberal democracy and towards right-wing populism”

In Turkey, The People’s Alliance, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), won a majority in the 2023 elections following a campaign which heavily used anti-gender rhetoric. Erdoğan even said at rallies that his coalition is “against the LGBT” and “a strong family means a strong nation”; he was re-elected as president. Just two years before, the country withdrew from the Istanbul Convention , the world’s leading treaty on gender-based violence, because it threatens “family values” and “normalizes homosexuality.”  

Women demonstrators in Istanbul clash with Turkish police on July 1, 2021, as they protest against Turkey's decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention. Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images

In Ghana, a new anti-homosexuality law was passed by parliament just last month. The Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Act criminalizes LGBTQ+ relationships, as well as anyone supporting LGBTQ+ rights. UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima warned that the law “will negatively impact on free speech, freedom of movement and freedom of association” and “obstruct access to life-saving services, undercut social protection, and jeopardize Ghana’s development success.” A recent CNN investigation uncovered alleged links between a US nonprofit and the drafting of the homophobic law. The group denied those links, claiming they were simply promoting “family values”.  

In India, anti-gender proponents are closely linked with Hindu nationalist movements, known as Hindutva. Hindu nationalism has long relied on gender norms , encouraging women to focus on being mothers to ensure the Hindu population of India does not decrease. Traditional patriarchal social structures – where men lead and women follow – are held up as part of India’s “golden past,” to which Hindutva followers want to return. 

People wearing black masks gather to raise awareness of violence against women, in Mumbai, India, on August 2, 2023. Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto/Getty Images

When and where did the anti-gender movement begin?

The anti-gender movement emerged in the early 1990s in response to international conferences that catalyzed recognition of gender at the United Nations and accelerated progress on gender equality, including the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights.   

Historically, the concept of “the family,” which the contemporary anti-gender movement seeks to defend, can be traced back to colonial English and European ideas of the heterosexual nuclear family as the backbone of society.  

In the early 2000s, the Catholic Church began sounding the gender alarm, claiming that “violent attacks on the institution of the family” were taking place. The Church perceived new laws on same-sex marriage and abortion as corroding morals. Pope John Paul II declared that “misleading concepts concerning sexuality and the dignity and mission of the woman” were driven by “specific ideologies on ‘gender.’” This led to the emergence of the term “gender ideology,” which conservative and fundamentalist groups began using to refer to the broad swathe of issues they oppose, including LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, and gender equality.  

Men pray and display posters of the Virgin Mary during a demonstration during a demonstration conducted mainly by men against abortion, premarital sex and women's modest clothes in Zagreb, Croatia on April 1, 2023. Denis Lovrovic/AFP/Getty Images

A decade later, anti-gender protests emerged in parts of Europe, with supporters initially mobilized by the Catholic Church. Though Pope Francis may differ from his predecessors in his view on gay people in church, on March 1, 2024, he told participants at a Vatican conference that “the ugliest danger is gender ideology” because it erases differences between men and women. “ Cancelling out the differences means cancelling out humanity,” the pontiff said.  

And so, in 2024, for anti-gender actors, the term “gender” now encompasses everything from the concept of gender itself, to gender studies, legal protections for transgender people, survivors of domestic violence and rape, and women and girls in general. In fact, according to the Association of Women in Development , the concept is now being used to attack all sorts of progressive “struggles,” including even environmental issues.  

How does the anti-gender movement push its agenda?

Anti-gender arguments broadly fall into three groups: nationalist (or cultural), religious, and political. The three frequently overlap. In Poland, for example, politician and former Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński said in 2019 that he believed the “LGBT movement and gender threaten our identity, threaten our nation [and] endanger the Polish state.”  

In nationalist arguments, women and LGBTQ+ rights are often positioned as being foreign imports. In China, feminist ideas have been called “unpatriotic”, and outspoken women online are frequently attacked by nationalist trolls for their allegedly anti-China views .  

Las defensoras: 30 personas que protegen los derechos de las mujeres y la comunidad LGBTQ+

Meanwhile in Kyrgyzstan, in 2021, nationalists attacked women protesting gender-based violence, with one man saying he acted because “Western values are being imposed on our young people. If they want to promote these values, let them do it in some other country.”  

Religious arguments are driven by conservative and fundamentalist interpretations of religion that uphold strict ideas around gender and sexuality.  

In Indonesia and Malaysia, 2023 concerts by British band Coldplay were met with opposition from Islamic groups. Even the Indonesian Ulama Council, the country’s top Islamic scholars’ body, alleged Coldplay would promote LGBTQ+ rights, and protesters gathered outside the band’s concert in Jakarta, some holding posters saying Coldplay were damaging Indonesia’s “faith and morals” . In Malaysia, organizers reportedly prepared a “kill switch” in case the band did anything to offend “local morals and sensibilities.”

Jakarta, Indonesia, November 15, 2023: Protesters demand the cancellation of a concert by British rock band Coldplay, which they say supports LGBTQ+ rights. Mas Agung Wilis/AFP/Getty Images

For right-wing and far-right politicians, the anti-gender movement offers a way to stir up what is known as a “moral panic.” A moral panic is a widespread but exaggerated fear that a group, person, or concept poses a threat to society.   

For example, in Brazil, former President Jair Bolsanaro , during the course of his 2018 presidential campaign, accused his opponent of making “gay kits” for schools while education minister. He also accused teachers of “indoctrinating” children through gender and sexuality education. There was no evidence that this was in fact the case.  

While the strategies used by anti-gender movements varies from place to place, one distinctive trait of this trend is just how networked the different actors are. For example, according to the UN Research Insitute for Social Development , the World Congress of Families – a US-based group which has been called “ one of the most influential American organizations involved in the export of hate” – has held events to connect “pro-family” actors in cities as diverse as Mexico City, Tblisi, Accra, Amsterdam, Madrid, and Geneva since 1997.  

"US-based organizations are important funders for anti-gender movements globally”

Another US-based organization, Family Watch International , has mobilized campaigns against comprehensive sexuality education across East and Southern Africa . Family Watch International is also named in a CNN investigation as having “ hosted key politicians pushing anti-LGBTQ laws” – though the organization denies involvement in formulating legislation.  

Who funds the anti-gender movement?

In addition to having clear links across countries and regions, the anti-gender movement is also funded transnationally.  

A 2021 trends report, produced by the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURS), lists four funding sources: ultra-conservative grant-makers and private donors; religious institutions; businesses and corporations; and funding from other organizations, such as state-funded institutions.  

US-based organizations are important funders for anti-gender movements globally. The Global Philanthropy Project found that at least $1billion was channelled overseas by just 11 US-based organizations to fight LGBTQ+ and women’s rights between 2008 and 2017. The authors of the report state that this amount “is surely an undercount.”  

Not all sources of funding to anti-rights groups are intentionally in support of their agenda. Reporting by CNN As Equals shows that aid from donors such as the US and Germany had also flowed to religious organizations in Ghana which support the country’s new anti-LGBTQ+ bill, which was unanimously passed on February 28 .  

On February 28 Ghana's parliament passed an anti-LGBTQ+ bill that criminalizes members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as its supporters. Misper Apawu/AP

What impact is the anti-gender movement having on human rights and democracy?

From Peru to Russia , women’s and LGBTQ+ organizations and activists are increasingly being criminalized, arrested, physically or sexually attacked, and even killed for their work.  

1 in 4 activists from 67 countries surveyed in 2023 by The Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation  – which has been monitoring the security situation for women human rights defenders for more than a decade  – said they have received death threats for their work, and 58% said their own governments were behind the threats.

Women hold candles and flowers during a "Dark Valentine" vigil to demonstrate against the rising cases of femicide, in Nairobi, Kenya, on February 14. Brian Inganga/AP

Attacks on defenders create an atmosphere of fear, further restricting activism and especially discouraging ordinary citizens from standing up for their rights, while new laws actively prevent people from speaking up.  

Indonesia’s new Criminal Code, ratified in 2022, sets out that only “permitted authorities” can share information on contraception and abortion with anyone under the age of 18, meaning that even social media posts about condoms or birth control pills could be restricted. Similar issues are being encountered in India, where social media content moderation policies are pushing information on sex and sexuality behind sensitivity filters .  

Ultimately, anti-gender activities are contributing to “ democratic erosion .” American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler argues that “anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian go vernments.” Butler goes on: “ The opposition to ‘gender’ often merges with anti-migrant furor a nd fear, which is why it is often, in Christian contexts, merged with Islamophobia.”  

High school students protest a Republican-backed bill that would prohibit classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, in Tampa, Florida, on March 3, 2022. Octavio Jones/Reuters

How is the anti-gender movement being resisted?

It’s not all bad news. As the OURs report states: “Feminist movements around the world have also been building strategies and tactics to advance our agendas. In fact, many anti-rights strategies and tactics have been inspired by us!”   

And so, people around the world continue to fight back against anti-gender ideology, with organizations, activists, and ordinary citizens mobilizing to continue advancing human rights. But being a human rights defender remains a dangerous business: many face threats, violence, and criminalization on a regular basis.  

CNN has profiled 30 “defenders”. Find out who they are here: in English o en Español .

Ten things to know about gender equality

In 2015, the 193 member countries of the United Nations came together to commit to 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 5 focused on gender equality and set the ambitious target of achieving gender equality  and empowering women and girls everywhere by 2030. Five years later, large gender gaps remain across the world, and the early evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a regressive effect on gender equality.

How can we ensure that the role of women in the workplace and in society is central to efforts to rebuild economies in the COVID-19 era, and that women do not fall further behind? As world leaders at the UN General Assembly assess progress, look ahead to recovery, and commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and the Beijing declaration , we offer our perspectives on the ten things everyone should know about gender equality.

1. Tackling the global gender gap will boost global GDP

Gender inequality is not only a pressing moral and social issue but also a critical economic challenge. A 2015 report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), The Power of Parity: How advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth , explored the economic potential available if the global gender gap was narrowed. Five years ago, women generated 37 percent of global GDP despite accounting for 50 percent of the global working-age population. The research found that in a best-in-region scenario in which all countries match the performance of the country in their region that has made the most progress toward gender equality, $12 trillion a year could be added to GDP in 2025. That would be equivalent in size to the GDP of Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined, and roughly double the likely growth in global GDP contributed by female workers between 2014 and 2025 in a business-as-usual scenario. Both advanced and developing economies would stand to gain considerably; all regions could achieve at least 8 percent in incremental GDP over business-as-usual levels. In a full-potential scenario in which women match men’s participation in the workforce, their sector mix, and their full-time mix of jobs, the additional GDP opportunity could be $28 trillion, or an additional 26 percent of annual global GDP in 2025. That would be roughly equivalent to the GDP of the United States and China. As we note in item number 6, the COVID-19 pandemic has added new urgency—and new risks—to achieving the economic benefits of gender parity. We have updated our calculations accordingly.

2. Progress toward gender equality has been marginal since 2015; large gaps remain

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, global progress in tackling gender gaps—in both work and society—had been marginal since 2015. MGI mapped 15 indicators of gender equality in work (how men and women engage in paid work, how they share unpaid work, and their representation in high-productivity and formal jobs, and in leading positions in the economy) and society (essential services and enablers of economic opportunity like digital and financial inclusion, legal protection and political voice, and physical security and autonomy). Gender equality in society and gender equality in work are correlated based on MGI’s analysis of 125 countries. While absolute scores on equality in society tend to be higher than those of equality in work for most countries, we found virtually no countries with high equality on social indicators and low equality in employment and labor markets. This suggests that solutions need to tackle both.

We aggregated the 15 indicators into a Gender Parity Score, or GPS, ranging from zero (no gender equality) to one (full gender equality). In the past five years, progress has been marginal. Gender gaps remain across all regions (Exhibit 1). In 2015, the global GPS was 0.60; today, it is 0.61. For gender equality in work, the overall score in 2019 was 0.52, up from 0.51 in 2015. For gender equality in society, the overall score in 2019 was 0.67, up from 0.66 in 2015. These trends are similar across regions. The Middle East and North Africa region experienced the biggest increase in gender equality, rising from a global GPS of 0.47 in 2015 to 0.50 in 2019. However, some regions have experienced declines in either gender equality in work or gender equality in society since 2015.

All is not doom and gloom—there are significant bright spots to celebrate. Maternal mortality is decreasing in most places, and literacy and secondary education enrollment are increasing in many countries. At work, too, most countries are making slow and steady progress in equality. McKinsey has conducted research on gender diversity in North American companies in partnership with LeanIn.Org on since 2015. The research finds that 87 percent of North American companies today report gender diversity is a top priority , compared with 74 percent in 2015, but this reported priority still needs to translate into more decisive action. Representation of women in the C-suite in North America has increased to 21 percent, from 17 percent in 2015.

3. Over the past two decades, while women in advanced economies have made large gains as workers, consumers, and savers, they have faced rising costs and insecurity

Although women in advanced economies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have made far-reaching gains as workers, consumers, and savers  over the past two decades, much of this progress has been offset by rising costs and new forms of insecurity that disproportionately affect women. Between 2000 and 2018, women accounted for two-thirds of 45 million jobs created in 22 OECD countries, but many of these jobs were part-time or independent work that were less secure and offered lower pay and fewer benefits. In this period, female part-time employment increased by 2.3 percentage points, versus a 0.7-percentage-point increase in full-time employment for women. As consumers, women—and men—benefited from a sharp decline in the prices of many discretionary goods and services such as communications and recreation, but that was offset by rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education that absorbed 54 to 107 percent of the average household’s income gains in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As savers, the outlook for women is also challenging. One study found that while women’s median net wealth is higher overall than it was two decades ago, a large gender gap remains. In Europe, women’s median net wealth is 62 percent that of men.

4. Women continue to work a double shift at home

While women face inequality in the world of work, they also face inequalities in the home. Around the world, women do three times as much unpaid care work as men. As one of many examples around the world, the “double shift” is a fact of life for millions of women in China , who go out to work but then do the lion’s share of work in the home as well. On average, they work nearly nine hours a day, and only about half of that is paid. Putting the two together, on average women in China work almost one entire day a week more than men. In some countries like India, women do almost ten times as much unpaid care work as men. This phenomenon is by no means confined to developing economies; it is a consistent fact that women work a double shift in advanced economies, too. In the United States, for instance, women still do almost twice as much unpaid care work  as men; 54 percent of women but only 22 percent of men report doing all or most of the housework . Even among individuals who earn the majority of their household’s income, 43 percent of women who are primary household income earners continue to do all or most of the household work, compared with only 12 percent of men. In addition, working women are more likely than their male colleagues to have a working spouse: 81 percent of women are part of a dual-career couple and have two careers to balance, while only 56 percent of men are part of a dual-career couple.

5. Women face growing challenges from automation

Growing automation adoption adds to the challenges that women face in the workplace. MGI research  found that the share of women whose jobs are replaced by machines and will likely need to make job transitions due to automation is roughly the same as for men: up to one in four over the next decade may have to shift to a different occupation. Between 40 million and 160 million women globally may need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higher-skill roles (Exhibit 2).

The particular challenge for women is that long-standing barriers make it harder for them to adapt to the future of work. Women and men alike need to develop (1) the skills that will be in demand; (2) the flexibility and mobility needed to negotiate labor-market transitions successfully; and (3) the access to and knowledge of technology necessary to work with automated systems, including participating in its creation. Unfortunately, women often face long-established and pervasive structural and societal barriers that could hinder them in all three of these areas. Women may have less time to refresh or learn new skills or to search for employment because they spend much more time than men on unpaid care work. They may also face financial constraints in doing so. And they may not have the professional networks and sponsors that could make it easier for them to navigate job transitions, among other factors. Moreover, women tend to have less access to digital technology and lower participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields than men. If women make these transitions, they could find more productive, better-paid work; if they don’t, they could face a growing wage gap or leave the labor market altogether.

6. The challenge for women is now even greater as they experience economic fallout from COVID-19

Although the early evidence suggests that the COVID-19 infection has been more deadly for men than women—the death rate for men in countries like China, Italy, and South Korea has been almost double the rate for women—women’s economic prospects have been hit the hardest. On employment, our research  has found that women’s jobs globally are 1.8 times as vulnerable to this crisis as men’s jobs. Women make up 39 percent of global employment but accounted for 54 percent of overall job losses as of May 2020. Globally, part of the reason is that women are disproportionately represented in industries that are expected to decline the most in 2020 due to COVID-19 (Exhibit 3). Another factor is that during the pandemic, even more unpaid care work such as childcare and home schooling fell to women as nurseries and schools closed; in the United States, for example, the amount of time women spend on household responsibilities has increased by 1.5 to two hours, according to one study . The pandemic may have had noneconomic consequences for women, too—some reports suggest that the prevalence of violence against women from an intimate partner may have increased during lockdowns . If no action is taken to counter the gender-regressive impacts of COVID-19, we calculate that global GDP growth could be $1 trillion lower in 2030 than it would be if women’s unemployment simply tracked that of men in each sector. That hit to growth could be even larger if increased childcare responsibilities, a slower recovery, and reduced public and private spending on services such as education and childcare force women to leave the labor market permanently. However, if action is taken to advance gender equality, $12 trillion could be added to global GDP in 2030 compared with the baseline, as noted earlier; this implies a $13 trillion potential compared with the gender-regressive scenario in which global GDP slides back by $1 trillion in 2030. A middle path—taking action only after the crisis has subsided rather than now—would reduce the potential opportunity by more than $5 trillion.

7. We can grow our way out of some gender equality issues but not others

Even if policy makers and companies manage to craft a robust economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, there is no guarantee that a resumption of economic growth will help revive progress toward gender equality. For many years, it has been clear that economic growth (rising per capita GDP) does not lift all segments of the population—we cannot grow our way out of some aspects of gender equality.

In MGI’s 2015 power of parity report, we identified ten “impact zones.” These are the largest concentrations of gender inequality, where action to tackle gender gaps would have the most impact. In five global impact zones, gender inequality is high whether women live in an advanced or emerging economy: blocked economic potential (including women’s participation in leadership positions and formal work), time spent in unpaid care work, fewer legal rights, political underrepresentation, and violence against women. Today, for every 100 men in leadership positions globally, there are just 37 women. One in three women globally, including in developed countries like the United States, has experienced violence from an intimate partner at some time in her life. In these impact zones, economic growth alone is insufficient to guarantee progress; sustained and proactive interventions will be needed.

In contrast, in some geographies, economic growth could help advance gender inequality in five regional impact zones where certain aspects of gender inequality are most prominent. They are low labor-force participation in quality jobs (in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa), low maternal and reproductive health (in sub-Saharan Africa), unequal education levels (in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa), financial and digital exclusion (in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa), and girl-child vulnerability (in China and South Asia). For many of these impact zones, economic growth can increase the provision of services that could help improve outcomes. In Africa, for instance, rising per capita GDP should enable more healthcare provision, reducing maternal mortality. As countries increase their standard of living, girls typically attain increasing levels of education. In developed countries, women are now outperforming men academically on many dimensions. In the United States, for example, women receive 57 percent of college degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and have higher overall average GPAs (but still lag behind men in STEM graduation rates).

8. Companies that are gender and ethnically diverse outperform their peers

Advancing gender equality is not just an opportunity for countries; companies also stand to gain. McKinsey research on Diversity Matters (2015), on Delivering through Diversity (2018), and most recently in May 2020 on Diversity Wins examined whether companies with higher levels of both gender and ethnic diversity have greater economic performance. The 2020 research examined a data set of more than 1,000 large companies in 15 countries and found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. Companies in the top quartile of ethnic and cultural diversity were 36 percent more likely to outperform on profitability. The highest-performing companies on both profitability and diversity had more women in line roles (that is, owning a line of business) than in staff roles on their executive teams. The research also found a penalty for bottom-quartile performance on gender diversity: companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic diversity were 27 percent more likely to underperform the industry average than all other firms.

Given all the competing priorities arising from the current pandemic, there is a significant risk that inclusion and diversity may recede as strategic priorities for organizations as companies focus on recovery. Downgrading diversity could well be a mistake, compromising performance and thwarting efforts to strengthen recovery over time.

9. The corporate career pipeline for women is leaky, especially early on

Over the years, our research with LeanIn.Org has found some progress in the advancement of women through the corporate pipeline in North America. In the 2019 Women in the Workplace  report, we found that, of entry-level workers, 48 percent were women, compared with 45 percent in 2015. Women made up 21 percent of the C-suite, compared with 17 percent in 2019. However, as these numbers show, women are underrepresented at all levels of organizations, and the pipeline is leaky between the entry level and the C-suite. The biggest obstacle to women on the corporate ladder is a “broken rung” in the first step up to the manager level. For every 100 men hired or promoted to manager, there are only 72 women—and only 58 black women. After this initial degree of drop-off, it is very difficult for women to make up the ground lost. If differences in promotion rate are aggregated across five years, this equates to a difference of one million women in leadership roles.

Women of color are especially underrepresented in the North American workforce and face the steepest drop-offs. In North America, 18 percent of entry-level positions are held by women of color, but their representation in the C-suite is 4 percent, according to our 2019 Women in the Workplace research. These outcomes are mirrored in the day-to-day experiences of women of color in the workforce—56 percent of black women say they and their peers have equal opportunity for growth, compared with 69 percent of white women. Women of color also experience more workplace “microaggressions.” For example, 40 percent of black women and 30 percent of Asian women say they needed to provide more evidence of their competence than others, compared with 28 percent of white women and 14 percent of men.

We find similar trends across the world. Across Asia–Pacific , for instance, there is only one woman in leadership positions for every four men. In some countries in East Asia, there are only 12 to 20 women leaders for every 100 men.

10. All stakeholders need to work together to maintain and accelerate progress on gender equality

There is a huge amount to do, particularly given that the automation age and now COVID-19 mean that women face new challenges on top of old ones. The only way to breathe new life into efforts to meet Sustainable Development Goal 5 is for the main stakeholders to work together on comprehensive solutions to the complex issue of gender inequality. As governments design stimulus programs and companies look for restart strategies in the wake of the pandemic, it will be important not to ignore potential gender consequences; indeed, it’s time to double down by putting gender at the heart of these initiatives to capture opportunities. More data will be needed to ensure greater transparency and understanding of gender consequences.

National governments can enable change on a broader front using the law. For instance, they can remove legal barriers against women working (such as regulations prohibiting women from working night shifts) and can enforce laws protecting women from violence. The policy tool kit is wide-ranging, from financial support for women such as cash transfers, to tax regulations, childcare programs, and ensuring that public infrastructure is built and designed with gender in mind. The importance of reducing the gender gap in who takes responsibility for caregiving cannot be overstated, and governments can play an important role here. Some governments have enacted quotas to ensure a minimum level of women in leadership roles. Others have accelerated gender equality through incentives for women’s education, entrepreneurship, and business lending, for instance. Nongovernmental organizations also have an important role to play, for example in shaping attitudes and social norms. Many governments and NGOs have developed fruitful partnerships with companies to scale new solutions quickly. Finally, stimulus programs can be used to help invest in women and girls.

Companies can act on a number of fronts starting with their own employees, attracting, retaining, and promoting women and understanding where the pinch points in the talent pipeline are greatest. Leaders need to champion gender diversity, ensuring that hiring and promotions are fair and fostering an inclusive and respectful culture. In the COVID-19 era, many companies are exploring family-friendly policies, including flexible and part-time positions, to support workers experiencing an increased childcare burden, as well as rethinking performance reviews and promotions. Companies can use this moment to design and put in place policies and practices that can support women in the long term. Companies can also use their supply chains and procurement practices to support women-owned businesses and hold suppliers accountable to diversity and inclusion targets.

Individuals need to make a contribution, too, from advocating for themselves in their own careers to helping others advance through sponsorship and mentorship. At work, they can be proactive in supporting talented women and speaking up if they see unconscious bias or microaggressions. In their personal lives, they can explore their own biases, both conscious and unconscious. If they have families, they can aim to raise sons and daughters who are not constrained by gender. If they are investing, they can back companies that are driving gender equality in a way that is consistent with their values.

Five years after the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals, progress on gender equality has been modest at best, and now the effort to narrow gender gaps faces new challenges in the form of automation trends and the regressive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. With only ten years left to meet Goal 5, progress needs to accelerate. Achieving equality for half the world’s population is a global imperative that risks being undermined by competing priorities in a complex world and by the challenges of recovering from the pandemic. Creating more opportunity for women and the next generation is an aspiration and a very real goal that can lift the global economy as well as contributing to a more just society. It is a goal we need to meet collectively.

The authors wish to thank MGI’s co-chair James Manyika, based in San Francisco, and MGI director Jonathan Woetzel, in Shanghai, for their ongoing contributions to gender equality research.

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COVID-19 and gender equality: Countering the regressive effects

The future of women at work: Transitions in the age of automation

Realizing gender equality’s $12 trillion economic opportunity

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Ketaki Deo, right, and Charlie Whittington, students at George Washington University, arrive for an event supporting The Equality Act, a comprehensive nondiscrimination bill for LGBT rights, on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 1, 2019. (AP)

If Your Time is short

Some lawmakers have pushed back on an anti-LGBTQ discrimination bill by saying that there are only two genders: male and female.

Scientists, public health agencies and biologists say gender identity goes beyond male and female. The CDC says gender refers to “the cultural roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes expected of people based on their sex.”

Sex, which is different from gender, refers to “the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons,” according to the WHO. There are more outcomes than simply male and female.

On one side of the Capitol Hill hallway is a pink and blue flag, a symbol for transgender pride. Directly across is a sign that says: "There are TWO genders: male & female. ‘Trust the science!’"

"Thought we’d put up our transgender flag so she can look at it every time she opens her door," tweeted Rep. Marie Newman, D-Ill., who has a transgender daughter.

"Thought we’d put up ours so she can look at it every time she opens her door," tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Their dispute is a microcosm of a larger debate over the Equality Act, a Democratic proposal to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Newman supports the bill; Greene opposes it.

Supporters say the Equality Act provides overdue anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans who in many states can be denied housing and access to other services based on their identity. Some opponents say that the proposal infringes on the rights of faith-based organizations. 

Our neighbor, @RepMarieNewman , wants to pass the so-called "Equality" Act to destroy women’s rights and religious freedoms. Thought we’d put up ours so she can look at it every time she opens her door 😉🇺🇸 https://t.co/7joKpTh6Dc pic.twitter.com/aBGRSiIF6X — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) February 24, 2021

Much of the political debate has centered on gender identity — particularly Greene’s notion that there are "two genders." However, public health agencies, doctors and biologists say science is clear: Gender identity goes beyond male and female.

"Sex is a biological term, gender is a social construct," said Ignacio T. Moore, a biological sciences professor at Virginia Tech. "In other words, gender can vary with society and culture."

The belief that there are only two genders is an oversimplification, "and what science really tells us is that it is more complicated," said Dr. Jason Rafferty, a clinical assistant professor at Brown University.  

The Equality Act , which passed the House largely along party lines, would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act by prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Equality Act would supersede the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act , a law intended to protect religious practices from government interference. (The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1997 that the federal law did not apply to states, prompting some states to pass their own version of the law.) 

If the Equality Act became law, private businesses that are open to the public — including retail stores such as bakeries and flower shops — would not be permitted to deny service to LGBTQ people by claiming it violates their religious beliefs. The bill applies to employment, education, housing, credit, jury service, public accommodations, and programs that receive federal funding.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he would bring the legislation to a vote on the Senate floor, and President Joe Biden promised to sign the Equality Act.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, center, speaks about the Equality Act on Feb. 25, 2021, with Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and other lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a list of terminology associated with sex and gender, acknowledging that terms and definitions "may change over time."

Gender refers to "the cultural roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes expected of people based on their sex," according to the CDC . Gender is not assigned at birth — it derives its meaning from the society in which one lives.

"Human nature is diverse in many ways that goes beyond simply biological and anatomical differences between people, and we are coming to understand that gender is such a characteristic that can be both complicated and personal," Rafferty said. "A person’s gender identity may be masculine, feminine, a combination of both or neither, or it may shift over time."

Cisgender is the term used to describe someone whose gender aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, such as biological males who identify as men. There are numerous other ways for people to describe their gender identity, including nonbinary (individuals who identify as neither a man nor a woman) and transgender (individuals whose gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth).

A February Gallup poll found that 5.6% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ, and 0.6% identify specifically as transgender. Gallup noted that those numbers could underestimate the actual population, as older adults may be less likely to self-identify as LGBTQ.

Sexual orientation is often conflated with gender identity and sex, said Karen Parker, director of the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office at the National Institutes of Health. But all three categories are distinct, and sexual orientation primarily "relates to identity attraction and behavior," she said.

The World Health Organization says sex refers to "the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs." 

One might think that sex is a trait with only two biological possibilities. But medical research and firsthand accounts indicate that strictly male and female sex characteristics are not the only outcomes.

The biological sex of humans is partially determined by the configuration of chromosomes, the long strands of DNA that contain the genetic information of an organism. If you’re born with two X chromosomes, your biological sex will most likely be female. Biological males typically have one X and one Y chromosome.

In this June 6, 2019, photo, Victory, an intersex girl, points to her baby photo, as her brother Richard and her mother Amie Schofield look on, at their home in Ogden, Utah. (AP)

Sometimes, there’s a discrepancy between someone’s sex assigned at birth and their biological, physiological or physical characteristics. Intersex is a term that’s used to describe any variation in sex characteristics, which can sometimes be related to chromosomes and hormones.

Moore offered some examples that could result in someone being intersex:

People with Y chromosomes that lack a specific gene can develop and identify as females.

People with testes that do not descend into the scrotum can develop and identify as females.

People with testosterone levels typical of a biological male but who lack the receptor for the hormone can develop and identify as female.

"With these factors in mind," Moore said. "I think it becomes clear that an individual’s sex is not necessarily binary, as factors can conflict."

Estimates for the proportion of babies who are born intersex range from 0.018% to 1.7%, depending on how intersex is defined. 

Nature provides variations in sex and humans decide how to categorize them, said Alice Dreger, a bioethicist who has researched differences of sex development. "Nature doesn’t tell us who counts as male, who counts as female and who counts as intersex — we draw those lines," she said.

A misunderstanding of gender identity and sex deserves clarification, experts said, because LGBTQ Americans — particularly youth — face more adverse health outcomes than other Americans.

"The big thing to remember is that it’s not just politics," Rafferty said. "These are people’s lives."

RELATED:  Rachel Levine does not support gender confirmation surgery for all children

Our Sources

Alice Dreger, " Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex "

American Journal of Human Biology, " How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis ," Feb. 11, 2000

Anne Fausto-Sterling, " Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality "

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Adolescent and School Health: Terminology

Congress.gov, H.R.1308 - Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993

Congress.gov, H.R.5 - Equality Act

Cureus, " Health Care Disparities Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth: A Literature Review ," April 2017

Email interview with Dr. Jason Rafferty, clinical assistant professor at Brown University, March 2, 2021

Gallup, " LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate ," Feb. 24, 2021

Healthline, " 64 Terms That Describe Gender Identity and Expression "

Human Rights Campaign, 2020 State Equality Index

Intersex Human Rights Australia, " Intersex population figures ," Sept. 28, 2013

Interview with Alice Dreger, bioethicist and differences of sex development researcher, March 2, 2021

Interview with David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist and emeritus professor at Binghamton University, March 1, 2021

Interview with Karen Parker, director of the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office at the National Institutes of Health, March 2, 2021

Email interview, Ignacio T. Moore, a biological sciences professor at Virginia Tech, March 2, 2021

The Journal of Sex Research, " How common is lntersex? A response to Anne Fausto‐Sterling ," Feb. 5, 2002

Letter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Feb. 23, 2021

Mayo Clinic, Congenital adrenal hyperplasia

Mayo Clinic, Klinefelter syndrome

Mayo Clinic, Turner syndrome

MedlinePlus, Intersex

National Human Genome Research Institute, " The Y chromosome: beyond gender determination " 

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, " What are the symptoms of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH)? " 

PolitiFact, Biden Promise Tracker: Enact the Equality Act

Quartz, " An intersex shark discovered near Taiwan shines a light on fluidity in the animal kingdom ," Dec. 27, 2017 

Rev, Pelosi, Schumer Press Conference on House Equality Act Transcript February 25

Teen Vogue, " 9 Young People on How They Found Out They Are Intersex ," Oct. 25, 2019

Tweet from Rep. Marie Newman, Feb. 24, 2021

Tweet from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Feb. 24, 2021

United Nations Free & Equal, FACT SHEET: Intersex

U.S. House of Representatives Clerk, Roll Call 39 | Bill Number: H. R. 5

World Health Organization, Gender and Genetics

World Health Organization, Gender and health

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Dispelling the myths: why the gender pay gap does not reflect the 'choices' women make

The Diversity Council’s report shows women are paid less just because they are women. So why are we still debating the existence of the pay gap?

A ccording to the World Economic Forum , there is no country on earth where women make as much as men for the same work. In their 2016 Global Gender Gap Report, it is estimated that, at current rates, it would take another 170 years to close the global pay gap between men and women .

The pay data for Australia certainly isn’t bucking this trend. It doesn’t matter which way you look at it, there is consensus that the gender pay gap exists . Even though the overall gap in Australia has reduced slightly over the past two years, according to data from the ABS women still make 16.2% less than men .

Yet, somehow, talking about the pay gap can still be controversial .

Too often in my job, I am called on to counter arguments about the gender pay gap being a “myth”, or that “the gender pay gap figure isn’t real; it’s a manipulated, oversimplified figure that doesn’t represent real situations”.

Earlier this month the organisation I lead, Diversity Council Australia, released an important report together with KPMG and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA). Called She’s Price(d)less – the economics of the gender pay gap , it presents a picture of the economics underlying the gender pay gap.

We asked KPMG to decompose the factors that make up the pay gap so that we could understand exactly why it persists and what we can do about it .

The resulting report counters the myths and provides the evidence that refutes a whole range of other “reasons” put forward about women earning less because they “choose” to work part-time or take time out of the workforce to care for family members.

And my hope is that, with this evidence in hand, we can have a rational conversation based on data, sound research and with the facts in mind.

So here goes.

Women are paid less because they ‘choose’ to work part-time

Our report showed that there has been a significant decrease in the impact of part-time employment on the gender pay gap. It has actually declined from 14% to 4%, in part because of an increase in higher-paid part-time roles for women. This is good news as it means that much of the hard work that has been done on improving flexible work options is starting to pay off.

The idea of “choice” becomes questionable, however, when one considers that overwhelmingly it is still women who take on the bulk of unpaid caring roles within families. There are a number of reasons for this (historical and social norms playing a significant part) but, given that men are paid more than women, for many families it just does not make financial sense for men to work part-time as it will result in a bigger cut to the family budget.

Women are paid less because they ‘choose’ lower-paying jobs

Our report showed that industrial and occupational segregation continue to be significant contributing factors to the gender pay gap. But while occupational segregation is decreasing (i.e. the different types of roles men and women do), the impact of industrial segregation (i.e. the different industries that men and women work in like mining or healthcare) has increased.

Women are not “choosing” to work in lower paying industries but, when large numbers of women start to work in an industry, they all get paid less. As Rhaina Cohen explained in an article in the Atlantic:

A study [by the sociologists Asaf Levanon, Paula England, and Paul Allison], which examined census data from 1950 to 2000, found that, when women enter an occupation in large numbers, that job begins to pay less, even after controlling for a range of factors like skill, race and geography. Their analysis found evidence of “devaluation” – that a higher proportion of women in an occupation leads to lower pay because of the discounting of work performed by women.

So, in other words: 50 years of data proved that the more women join an industry the less everyone gets paid.

If that’s not convincing enough, Cohen also pointed to a study showing that higher the percentage of women in an industry the lower its perceived “prestige”; and a study from 2007 that found that even where men’s low-wage jobs demand far less in terms of skill, education and certifications than women’s low-wage jobs, the male-dominated ones usually command higher hourly pay.

Women don’t have the same levels of education as men

Despite women reaching higher levels of educational attainment, there has not been an associated decrease in the pay gap between women and men. This graph from the KPMG report makes it clear:

The pay gap figure is bogus because it does not reflect ‘like-for-like’ pay gaps for employees in the same or comparable roles

It must be said that while it is illegal to pay women less than men doing the same jobs, it is still happening. WGEA’s annual report shows that, even in their first year in the workforce, male graduates earn more than female graduates entering the same roles. Recent estimates from Australia suggest that for partners in top firms, the like-for-like gap is up to 5%.

Women don’t negotiate for better pay so it’s their fault if they’re paid less

Again, it’s not true to say women don’t ask for raises. They just don’t receive them at the same rate as men. And there is evidence that when women do negotiate, they are actually penalised.

A recent study from Cass Business School, the University of Warwick and the University of Wisconsin shows that women ask for wage rises just as often as men but men are 25% more likely to get a raise when they ask. The study collected data from 4,600 Australian workers across more than 800 employers and found no difference in the likelihood of asking between the two genders. The authors suggested that it might actually be “how” women ask, that a lack of assertiveness in negotiations is often cited as a potential reason why women might make less money than men for similar work.

As WGEA explains, negotiation is usually associated with agentic, and therefore masculine, behaviour. When employers negotiate with women, they tend to offer less and are more likely to resist influence attempts. Studies have shown that women’s reluctance to enter negotiations is partly because they are penalised more than men for doing so. The more women anticipate backlash, the less inclined they are to initiate negotiations.

In other words, women are asking for raises but, if they ask too assertively, they’re turned down for being too pushy, and if they don’t ask assertively enough, they aren’t good negotiators so they don’t get a raise.

The pay gap reflects choices women make, not discrimination

First of all, there’s that questionable word, “choice”, again.

Secondly, what our study showed was that sex discrimination continues to be the single largest factor contributing to the gender pay gap, increasing from 35% in 2007 to 38% in 2014.

Sex discrimination in the report accounts for everything that is left after all the other factors that have an impact on the gender pay gap, such as age, tenure, time out of the workforce, occupation, industry, part-time work and sector, have been taken into account. This means that more than a third of the gender pay gap is the result of gender discrimination and unconscious bias.

In other words, women are paid less than men simply because they are women.

So if the new report She’s Price(d)less reveals anything above and beyond what we already know about pay inequity in the Australian economy, it is that we now know exactly what constitutes the gap.

Not only should this be enough to silence the sceptics but it should shine a light for individuals and their organisations – and indeed the wider community – on where to start fixing the problem.

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Emanuela lombardo, march 1st, 2021, how opposition to gender equality is expressed by radical right meps in the european parliament.

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Issues affecting gender equality are frequently debated in the European Parliament. Drawing on a recent study, Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo present new findings on how radical right MEPs express opposition to gender equality during plenary sessions.

The European Parliament is a unique transnational representative and democratic institution. It also has a reputation for being the most pro-gender equality actor among the EU’s decision-making institutions. The proportion of women MEPs in the parliament has steadily increased and is currently at 40 percent. The Parliament hosts parliamentary bodies, such as the Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM), which are tasked with ensuring a gender perspective is included in all policymaking. Despite a downturn in EU gender equality policies in the 2010s, the Parliament has generally been supportive of gender equality.

Yet, this picture has become fractured in recent years. Polarisation in the Parliament has increased with the influx of radical right populists. Gender is an important factor in this polarisation. One recent analysis indicates that after the 2019 European Parliament elections, the number of MEPs that oppose gender equality and women’s rights had risen to over 30 percent (around 210 out of 705 MEPs) – essentially doubling in comparison to the previous legislature.

A plenary session on 21 January this year provided an example of the variety of strategies and alliances which some radical right populists employ in the European Parliament to oppose gender equality. The Parliament was debating – as it often does – several topics related to gender equality, including the European Commission’s Gender Equality Strategy; a FEMM Committee report on the gender impact of the Covid-19 pandemic; and gender and the digital economy. Many of the speeches would have caught the ear of a feminist listener.

Several radical right populist MEPs from the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) groups used the occasion to ridicule gender equality. One argued that debates on “gender and common sense” should be held, while another suggested that playing cards might soon be in the firing line “because the King is worth more than the Queen”. Statements like these are designed to delegitimise the progressive politics of the Parliament and trivialise the issue of gender equality, which is a fundamental right and core value of EU democracy. Examples such as these serve to illustrate the need to understand how opposition to gender equality is expressed in the European Parliament.

Direct and indirect strategies

In a new study , we analyse the strategies used by radical right populists in the 2014-19 European Parliament to oppose gender quality. The aim of these strategies varies: from mobilising sympathisers and demobilising opponents; to defining the boundaries of ‘elites’ and ‘the people’ in populist politics; and shaping the borders of what is possible in terms of gender equality politics and policies. Such discourses are important not only in relation to their impact on policies, but because of the effect they have on the parameters of debates.

One of our key findings is that opposition to gender equality in the EU now includes direct opposition, not only  indirect  forms of opposition, which was the case in the past. Direct opposition comes, first, in the form of outright rejection of gender equality, and, second, with reference to what some radical right populists have termed ‘gender ideology’ – a term that is intended to portray gender knowledge as indoctrination. Homophobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic arguments are all direct forms of opposition to gender equality.

Credit: CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2020 – Source: EP

In the European Parliament’s plenary sessions, this approach serves to oppose gender equality and create a hostile environment for advancing it. The key populist elements of this opposition to ‘gender ideology’ include constructing an image of corrupt international elites interfering in national politics and imposing political correctness. The EU itself is often portrayed as a harmful proponent of ‘gender ideology’. Radical right populist MEPs have articulated these discourses while arguing that gender equality has been constructed in a harmful way that challenges natural categories of women, men, sexuality and family.

Indirect opposition comes in many forms. It may be based on  Euroscepticism , where MEPs hide their opposition to gender equality behind criticism of the EU’s approach to the issue. Another indirect strategy is bending gender equality to other goals. For example, instead of focusing on the problems that refugee women face – the purpose of one debate – some radical right populist MEPs have reframed the issue by arguing that European migration policies put ‘native women and children’ at risk. Islamophobic language is frequently used to construct an ‘other’ that is hostile to gender equality, with the EU accused of failing to protect ‘its’ women from this threat.

Other indirect opposition strategies include the use of s elf-victimisation , whereby radical right populists complain that their free speech has been inhibited by gender-sensitive language. In one debate on sexual harassment in the EU, some MEPs adopted a self-victimisation approach to shift blame onto the European Parliament for allegedly excluding a radical right populist group from the accompanying resolution. Parliamentary opponents were accused of double standards, resulting in an exchange that shifted the focus away from gender equality.

The impact of opposition to gender equality

The effect of these direct and indirect strategies is to make gender equality and feminist politics more contentious, increasing the levels of polarisation that surround debates on gender. They also reopen and question policies that have already been ‘accepted’, such as equal employment opportunities, gender quotas, LGBT rights and policies targeting gender violence.

While radical right populist MEPs can effectively monopolise debates during plenary sessions, they do not have a significant impact on votes about gender equality and they generally do limited work in committees. Their direct opposition to gender equality is nevertheless detrimental to the construction of equality and democracy in the European Parliament. This is because it shapes, in a restrictive manner, the meaning of gender equality and the nature of political agendas and commitments surrounding gender issues.

Yet, if gender equality becomes an increasingly politicised issue, with debates channelled through respectful confrontation, this may not in itself be a negative development. Direct opposition could result in making the arguments for and against gender equality more explicit and tangible. Once made explicit, direct opposition could be debated and countered by active supporters of gender equality.

For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in the International Political Science Review

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2020 – Source: EP

About the author

Johanna Kantola is Professor of Gender Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She directs the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant project EUGenDem, which studies the European Parliament’s political groups, gender and democracy. She has published extensively on gender and politics including the books Gender and Political Analysis (with Emanuela Lombardo), Gender and the European Union, and the co-edited volumes Gender and the Economic Crisis in Europe (with Emanuela Lombardo) and The Oxford Handbook on Gender and Politics.

Emanuela Lombardo is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of Madrid Complutense University, Spain. Her main research lines are on gender equality policies and Europeanisation, recently focusing on populism and de-democratisation. Her latest monographs are Gender and Political Analysis (with Johanna Kantola) and The Symbolic Representation of Gender (with Petra Meier). The last special issue she has edited is Populism and Feminist Politics (with Johanna Kantola in the International Political Science Review). She co-directs (with Maria Bustelo) the Spanish Ministry of Research funded project UNiGUAL and the research group Gender and Politics GEYPO.

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Justifying gender discrimination in the workplace: The mediating role of motherhood myths

Catherine verniers.

1 Paris Descartes University, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France

2 Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Associated Data

All relevant data are available from the GESIS Data Archive (doi: 10.4232/1.2620 and doi: 10.4232/1.12661 ).

The issue of gender equality in employment has given rise to numerous policies in advanced industrial countries, all aimed at tackling gender discrimination regarding recruitment, salary and promotion. Yet gender inequalities in the workplace persist. The purpose of this research is to document the psychosocial process involved in the persistence of gender discrimination against working women. Drawing on the literature on the justification of discrimination, we hypothesized that the myths according to which women’s work threatens children and family life mediates the relationship between sexism and opposition to a mother’s career. We tested this hypothesis using the Family and Changing Gender Roles module of the International Social Survey Programme. The dataset contained data collected in 1994 and 2012 from 51632 respondents from 18 countries. Structural equation modellings confirmed the hypothesised mediation. Overall, the findings shed light on how motherhood myths justify the gender structure in countries promoting gender equality.

Introduction

The latest release from the World Economic Forum—the Gender Gap Report 2016 [ 1 ]–indicates that in the past 10 years, the global gender gap across education and economic opportunity and politics has closed by 4%, while the economic gap has closed by 3%. Extrapolating this trajectory, the report underlines that it will take the world another 118 years—or until 2133 –to close the economic gap entirely. Gender inequalities are especially blatant in the workplace. For instance, on average women are more likely to work part-time, be employed in low-paid jobs and not take on management positions [ 2 , 3 ].

There is evidence that gender inequalities in the workplace stem, at least in part, from the discrimination directed against women. Indeed, several studies have documented personal discrimination against women by decision makers (for meta-analyses see [ 4 , 5 ], some of them having more specifically examined the role of the decision makers’ level of sexist attitudes on discriminatory practices. For instance, Masser and Abrams [ 6 ] found in an experimental study that the higher the participants scored in hostile sexism, the more they were likely to recommend a male candidate rather than a female one for a managerial position. In spite of consistent evidence that higher sexism is related to greater bias toward working women [ 7 ], little is known regarding the underlying processes linking sexism to discrimination. This question remains an important one, especially because the persistence of gender discrimination contradicts the anti-discrimination rules promoted in modern societies. In fact, the issue of gender equality in employment has given rise to numerous policies and institutional measures in advanced industrial countries, all aimed at tackling gender discrimination with respect to recruitment, promotion and job assignment. In the USA, for instance, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1963 Equal Pay Act provided the legal foundation for the implementation of anti-discrimination laws within the workplace. The Treaty on the European Union and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, all contain provisions relating to the promotion of equality between women and men in all areas, and the prohibition of discrimination on any ground, including sex. The member states of the European Union must comply with these provisions [ 8 ]. In this respect, some countries have incorporated legislation on equal treatment of women and men into general anti-discrimination laws (e.g., Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, Great Britain), while other countries have opted for a specific gender equality act (e.g., Spain). Comparable policies have been implemented in the Asian-Pacific area, with countries including gender equality into broad anti-discrimination laws (e.g., Australia), and other countries having passed laws especially dedicated to addressing discrimination against women (e.g., Japan, the Philippines). The purpose of this research is to further explore the psychosocial process involved in the stubborn persistence of gender discrimination in the workplace, using a comparative and cross-sectional perspective of national representative samples.

Psychosocial processes involved in justified discrimination

According to several lines of research [ 9 – 13 ], the expression of prejudice in contexts where social and political anti-discrimination values are prevalent implies justifications. Crandall and Eshleman [ 10 ] defined justifications as “any psychological or social process that can serve as an opportunity to express genuine prejudice without suffering external or internal sanction”. According to social dominance theory, justification of practices that sustain social inequality arises through the endorsement of legitimizing myths [ 13 ]. Moreover, research conducted in the field of system justification theory has extensively documented an increased adherence to legitimizing ideologies (including social stereotypes, meritocracy, political conservatism, etc.) in contexts where motivation to justify unequal social arrangements is heightened [ 14 – 17 ]. Relying on this literature Pereira, Vala and Costa-Lopes [ 18 ] provided evidence of the mediational role of myths about social groups on the prejudice-support for discriminatory measures relationship. Specifically, they demonstrated that the myths according to which immigrants take jobs away from the host society members and increase crime rates mediated the relationship between prejudice and opposition to immigration (see also [ 19 ]). We assume that an equivalent mediational process underlies the justification of gender discrimination in the workplace or, put differently, that the sexism-opposition to women’s career relationship is mediated by legitimizing myths. Glick and Fiske [ 20 ] conceptualised sexism as a multidimensional construct that encompasses hostile and benevolent sexism, both of which having three components: paternalism, gender differentiation and heterosexuality. We suspect that the gender differentiation component of sexism in particular may be related to gender discrimination in the workplace, because the maintenance of power asymmetry through traditional gender roles is at the core of this component [ 20 ]. Accordingly, it is assumed that the higher the endorsement of sexist attitudes regarding gender roles in the family, the higher the opposition to women’s work. In support of this assumption, Glick and Fiske [ 21 ] stated that gender roles are part of the more general interdependence between women and men occurring in the context of family relationships and, importantly, that these traditional, complementary gender roles shape sex discrimination. However, given that the expression of hostility towards women became socially disapproved [ 22 , 23 ] and that gender discrimination in the workplace is subjected to sanctions (see for instance [ 24 ]), the release of sexism with regard to women’s role in the family and women’s professional opportunities may require justification [ 10 , 19 ].

Motherhood myths as a justification for gender discrimination

Compared with other intergroup relations, gender relations present some unique features (e.g., heterosexual interdependence; [ 25 , 26 ] and accordingly comprise specific myths and ideologies aimed at maintaining the traditional system of gender relations [ 27 – 29 ]. For instance, the belief that marriage is the most meaningful and fulfilling adult relationship appears as a justifying myth, on which men and women rely when the traditional system of gender relations is challenged by enhanced gender equality measured at the national level [ 30 ]. Drawing on this literature, we propose that beliefs that imbue women with specific abilities for domestic and parental work ensure that the traditional distribution of gender roles is maintained. In particular, we suggest that motherhood myths serve a justification function regarding gender discrimination against women in the workplace. Motherhood myths include the assumptions that women, by their very nature, are endowed with parenting abilities, that at-home mothers are bonded to their children, providing them unrivalled nurturing surroundings [ 31 , 32 ]. Conversely, motherhood myths pathologised alternative mothering models, depicting employed mothers as neglecting their duty of caring, threatening the family relationships and jeopardizing mother-children bondings (see [ 33 ] for a critical review of these myths). Motherhood myths have the potential to create psychological barriers impairing women’s attempt to seek power in the workplace [ 34 ] and men’s involvement in child care [ 35 – 37 ]. We suggest that beyond their pernicious influence at the individual level of parental choices, motherhood myths might operate more broadly as justifications for gender discrimination regarding career opportunity. This question is of particular relevance given that equal treatment in the workplace appears even more elusive for women with children—the maternal wall [ 38 ] (see also [ 39 – 45 ]). At the same time, recognizing the pervasive justifying function of motherhood myths may help understand the psychosocial barriers faced not only by women who are mothers, but by women as a whole since "women are expected to become mothers sooner or later" (Dambrin & Lambert [ 46 ], p. 494; see also [ 47 ]). Relying on previous work documenting the mediational role of legitimizing myths on the prejudice—discrimination relationship [ 18 , 19 ] we suggest that the myths according to which women pursuing a career threaten the well-being of the family mediates the relationship between sexist attitudes regarding gender roles and opposition to women’s work.

Exploring gender and time as possible moderators of the hypothesized mediation

Besides the test of the main mediational hypothesis, the present research sought to explore time and gender as possible moderators of the assumed relationship between sexism, motherhood myths and discrimination. A review of the historical development of gender equality policies confirms that the implementation of laws and regulations aimed at eliminating gender discrimination in the workplace is a lengthy process (e.g., for the European countries see [ 48 ]; for the USA see [ 49 ]). In fact, although the basic principle of anti-discrimination has been enacted by many countries in the second half of the 20 th century, some measures are still adopted nowadays, such as the obligation for employers to publish information by 2018 about their bonuses for men and women as part of their gender pay gap reporting, a provision recently taken by the UK government. As egalitarian principles have gradually progressed in societies, it is likely that the expression of intergroup bias has become steadily subjected to social sanction. Thus, “as with racism, normative and legislative changes have occurred in many industrialized societies that make it less acceptable to express sexist ideas openly” (Tougas, Brown, Beaton, & Joly, [ 50 ], p. 843; see also [ 51 ]). Accordingly, gender discrimination within organizations became less intense and more ambiguous [ 52 – 54 ]. In line with this reasoning, the use of motherhood myths as a justification for unequal career opportunities may have increased over time. Conversely, it has been suggested that along with the increasing female participation in the labour market over the last decades, a positive attitude regarding the government-initiated women-friendly policies now coexists with an adherence to traditional family values and norms [ 55 ]. There is a possibility that the coexistence of contradictory norms in the same culture may leave some room for the expression of gender bias (i.e., a normative compromise, [ 56 ]), reducing slightly the need to rely on justifications to discriminate against working women. The present research will examine these possibilities by studying the role of motherhood myths on the sexism—discrimination relationship in 1994 and 2012.

Another possible moderator examined in the present study is the respondents' gender. Basically, the reason why people rely on justifications is to express their genuine prejudices without appearing biased. Consistent evidence, however, suggests that the perpetrator’s gender affects people’s perception of sexism towards women: given that sexism is generally conceived as involving a man discriminating against a woman, men are perceived as prototypical of the perpetrator [ 57 , 58 ]. As a consequence, sexist behaviours carried out by males are perceived as more sexist than the same behaviours enacted by females [ 59 , 60 ]. Moreover, the expression of sexism by women may go undetected due to the reluctance of women to recognize that they might be harmed by a member of their own gender group [ 22 ]. Taken together, these findings suggest that a woman is more likely than a man to express sexist bias without being at risk of appearing sexist. In line with this reasoning, one could assume that men need to rely on justifications to discriminate to a greater extent than women do. Alternatively, women expressing sexism against their ingroup members are at risk of being negatively evaluated for violating the prescription of feminine niceness [ 61 , 62 ]. As a consequence, women might be inclined to use justifications to discriminate in order to maintain positive interpersonal evaluations. An additional argument for assuming that women may rely on motherhood myths lies in the system justification motive. According to system justification theory [ 63 , 64 ], people are motivated to defend and justify the status quo, even at the expense of their ingroup. From this perspective, the belief that every group in society possesses some advantages and disadvantages increases the belief that the system is balanced and fair [ 29 , 65 ]. Motherhood myths imbue women with a natural, instinctual and biologically rooted capacity to raise children that men are lacking [ 66 ]. In addition, they convey gender stereotype describing women in positive terms (e.g., considerate, warm, nurturing) allowing a women-are-wonderful perception [ 27 ]. As a consequence, women are likely to rely on motherhood myths to restore the illusion that, despite men structural advantage [ 67 , 68 ], women as a group still possess some prerogatives [ 34 ].

The aim of the present study is to test the main hypothesis (H1) that motherhood myths are a justification that mediates the relationship between sexism and opposition to women’s work following the birth of a child. Additionally, two potential moderators of this mediational process are considered. The present research tests the exploratory hypotheses that (H2) the assumed mediational process is moderated by time and (H3) by participants’ gender. We tested these hypotheses using the Family and Changing Gender Roles module of the International Social Survey Programme [ 69 , 70 ]. This international academic project, based on a representative probabilistic national sample, deals with gender related issues, including attitudes towards women’s employment and household management. Hence this database enables a test of the proposed mediational model on a large sample of female and male respondents and data gathered 18 years apart.

We used the 2012 and 1994 waves of the ISSP Family and Changing Gender Roles cross-national survey [ 69 , 70 ]. The ISSP published fully anonymized data so that individual survey participants cannot be identified. The two databases slightly differed regarding the involved countries, some of which did not participate in the two survey waves. In order to maintain consistency across the analyses, we selected 18 countries that participated in both survey waves (i.e., Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the USA). The data file for the 2012 survey wave included 24222 participants (54.4% female participants), mean age = 49.38, SD = 17.54, and the data file for the 1994 survey wave included 27410 participants (54.4% female participants), mean age = 44.26, SD = 17.07.

The main variables used in this study are the following:

One indicator was used to capture sexism: “A man's job is to earn money; a woman's job is to look after the home and family”. This item taps into the gender differentiation component of sexism [ 20 , 25 ]. Participants answered on a 5 point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly agree to 5 = strongly disagree. Data was recoded so that the higher scores reflected higher sexism.

Motherhood myths

Two indicators were used that capture the myths about the aversive consequence of mother’s work for her child and the family: “A preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works” and “All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job”. Participants answered on a 5 point likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly agree to 5 = strongly disagree. Data was recoded so that the higher scores reflected higher endorsement of motherhood myths.

Opposition to women’s career

Two indicators were used to capture the opposition to women’s professional career following the birth of a child: “Do you think that women should work outside the home full-time, part-time or not at all when there is a child under school age?” and “Do you think that women should work outside the home full-time, part-time or not at all after the youngest child starts school?” Participants answered on a scale ranging from 1 = work full time, 2 = work part-time, 3 = stay at home.

In addition, the first step of our analyses involved the following control variables: participant’s gender and age, partnership status, educational level, subjective social status, attendance of religious services and political orientation.

The following section presents the results of a four-step analysis: The first step consists of a preliminary hierarchical regression analysis to establish the respective contributions of demographical variables, sexism and motherhood myths to opposition to women’s work. The second step is dedicated to a test of the construct validity of the proposed measurement model using Confirmatory Factor Analyses. The third step involves a test of the hypothesized mediation. Finally, the last step is a test of the hypothesized moderated mediations.

Step 1: Hierarchical regression analysis

Inspection of the correlation matrix ( Table 1 ) indicates that all the correlations are positive, ranging from moderate to strong. The pair of items measuring motherhood myths presents the strongest correlation ( r (48961) = .633), followed by the pair of items measuring opposition to women’s career ( r (45178) = .542).

All coefficients are significant at p < .001.

We conducted a hierarchical regression analysis to establish the respective contributions of demographical variables, sexism and motherhood myths to opposition to women’s work. In block 1, participant’s gender (male = -1, female = 1) and partnership (no partner = -1, partner = 1) were entered together with standardized scores of age, years of schooling, subjective social status, attendance of religious services and political orientation. Block 2 included sexism, the myths about the aversive consequence of mother’s work for her child and for family (all standardized). Predictors in block 1 accounted for 9% of the variance, F (7, 10140) = 157.89, p < .001. The analysis revealed the significant effects of participant’s gender ( B = -.033, SE = .006, p < .001), age ( B = .058, SE = .006, p < .001), years of schooling ( B = -.135, SE = .007, p < .001), subjective social status ( B = -.057, SE = .007, p < .001), religiosity ( B = .076, SE = .006, p < .001) and political orientation ( B = .04, SE = .006, p < .001). Partnership was unrelated to opposition to women’s career ( B = .002, SE = .006, p = .77). Taken together the results indicate that the higher the time of education and the subjective social status, the lower the opposition to women’s work. Conversely, the higher the age, religiosity and political conservatism, the higher the opposition to women’s work. Finally, results indicate that opposition to women’s work is more pronounced amongst men than amongst women. When entered in block 2, sexism and motherhood myths accounted for an additional 18% of the variance, indicating that these variables significantly improved the model’s ability to predict opposition to women’s work, over and above the contributions of gender, partnership, education, social status, religiosity and political orientation (Δ R 2 = .18), Δ F (3, 10137) = 854.04, p < .001. Specifically, the analysis revealed the significant effects of sexism ( B = .151, SE = .006, p < .001), myth about the aversive consequence of mother’s work for her child ( B = .10, SE = .007, p < .001) and myth about the aversive consequence of women’s work for family ( B = .09, SE = .007, p < .001). It should be noted that the effect of participant’s gender virtually disappeared after controlling for sexism and motherhood myths ( Table 2 ). In addition, we performed this hierarchical regression analysis separately for the two waves and consistently found that the variables of our model (sexism and the motherhood myths) explained more variance than the demographical variables.

Gender is coded -1 for men and 1 for women. Partnership is coded -1 for no partner and 1 for partner. All coefficients and Rs 2 are significant at the level p < .001, except the coefficients with superscripts:

a p > .10,

b p < .005.

Step 2: Confirmatory factor analyses

We conducted a CFA to check the construct validity of the proposed measurement model. CFA and subsequent analyses were all performed using R. 3.4.1 and the Lavaan package [ 71 ]. The loading of the single indicator of the sexism variable and the loading of the first indicator of the motherhood myths and opposition variables were constrained to 1.00 [ 72 ], and the three variables were allowed to correlate. Results show a good fit to the data, χ 2 (3, N = 42997) = 400.36, p < .001, CFI = .993, RMSEA = .05 [90% CI = .05, .06], SRMR = .01, AIC = 540804. In addition, we estimated an alternative model in which all items loaded on a unique latent variable. This alternative model shows a poorer fit to the data, χ 2 (5, N = 42997) = 8080.28, p < .001, CFI = .867, RMSEA = .19 [90% CI = .19, .19], SRMR = .07, AIC = 548480. The comparison of the two models indicates that the proposed measurement model fits the data better than the alternative one, Δ χ 2 (2, 42997) = 7679.9, p < .001. We repeated this comparison in each country and results confirm that the proposed measurement model fits better in all countries (see S1 Table for comparative test of the goodness of fit of the hypothesized measurement model vs. alternative measurement model in each country).

We tested the measurement invariance of the CFA model across the two survey waves. To do this, we conducted a model comparison to test for configural and metric invariances. Results indicate that the configural invariance can be retained, χ 2 (6, N = 42997) = 513.05, p < .001, CFI = .991, RMSEA = .06 [90% CI = .05, .06], SRMR = .01, AIC = 537580. When constraining the loadings to be equal across waves fit indices remain satisfactory, χ 2 (8, N = 42997) = 679.58, p < .001, CFI = .989, RMSEA = .06 [90% CI = .05, .06], SRMR = .02, AIC = 537743. The change in CFI is below the cutpoint of .01, indicating that the metric invariance can be retained and that further comparisons of the relationships between constructs across survey waves can be performed [ 73 , 74 ]. Furthermore, we repeated this comparison in each country and results support the configural invariance of the CFA model across survey waves in all countries. In addition, the full metric invariance is obtained in all but three countries—Poland, Slovenia and the USA. In these countries, the CFIs are larger than the cutpoint of .01, indicating a lack of full metric invariance. Nonetheless, we were able to retain a partial metric invariance of the CFA model across the survey waves by setting free one non-invariant loading [ 75 ], (see S2 Table for the test of the invariance of the measurement model across survey waves by country).

We tested the measurement invariance of the CFA model across gender groups using the same procedure as for the test of the measurement invariance across survey waves. The baseline model constraining the factor structure to be equal in the two gender groups shows good fit to the data, χ 2 (6, N = 42943) = 440.95, p < .001, CFI = 0.993, RMSEA = .05 [90% CI = .05, .06], SRMR = .01, AIC = 539573, indicating that the configural invariance is achieved for the two groups. Then we fitted a more restricted model in which the factor loadings were constrained to be equal across groups. This model allows testing for the metric invariance (equal loadings) of the model across gender. Once again, the results indicate that this constrained model show good fit to the data, χ 2 (8, N = 42943) = 469.14, p < .001, CFI = 0.992, RMSEA = .05 [90% CI = .04, .05], SRMR = .01, AIC = 539598. Furthermore, the Δ CFI is below the cutpoint of .01, indicating that the metric invariance can be retained [ 75 ]. This result confirms that cross gender comparisons of the relationships between constructs can reasonably be performed. Furthermore, we repeated this procedure in each country. Once again, the Δ CFIs are below the cutpoint of .01, indicating that the configural invariance of the CFA model across gender groups is achieved in all countries (see S3 Table for the test of the invariance of the measurement model across gender groups by country).

Step 3. Mediation analysis

Overview of the analysis strategy.

This study main hypothesis is that (H1) the more people hold sexist attitude regarding gender roles, the more they endorse motherhood myths, which in turn enhances the opposition to women’s career after the birth of a child. In order to test this assumption, we ran mediational analyses using structural equation modelling. First, we examined the goodness of fit of the hypothesized mediational model and compared it with the goodness of fit of two alternative models. In the first alternative model, motherhood myths predict sexism that, in turn, predicts opposition. In the second alternative model, opposition to women’s career predicts motherhood myths. After having established that the hypothesized model adequately fit the data, we examined the coefficients for the hypothesized relationships between variables.

Goodness of fit of the models

Inspection of the fit indices indicates that the hypothesized model fits the data better than the first alternative model in 16 out of the 18 analysed countries ( Table 3 ). Thus, in these countries the data is better accounted for by a model stating motherhood myths as a mediator of the sexism-opposition to women’s career relationship, rather than by a model stating sexism as a mediator of the myths-opposition to women’s career relationship. The comparison of the fit indices indicates that the two models fit the data to almost the same extent in the two remaining countries (i.e., Czech Republic, and Philippines). Finally, the second alternative model—where opposition to women’s career predicted motherhood myths and sexism—shows very poor fit to the data in all countries. This result suggests that endorsement of motherhood myths is not a mere consequence of discrimination.

Δ χ 2 compares the second alternative model with the hypothesized mediational model. All Δ χ 2 tests are significant at p < .001. The hypothesized mediational model and the first alternative model are not nested and therefore a Δ χ 2 test cannot be computed.

Test of the relationships between variables

The goodness of fit of the proposed mediational model having been established in 16 countries out of 18, we next examined the coefficients for the hypothesized relationships in these countries. Table 4 shows the results of the mediation analysis in the 16 retained countries. The total effect of sexism on opposition to women’s career is positive and significant in all countries. The direct effect is reduced in all countries when controlling for the indirect effect through motherhood myths. As recommended in the literature, the indirect effects were subjected to follow-up bootstrap analyses using 1000 bootstrapping resamples [ 76 ]. The null hypothesis is rejected and the indirect effect is considered significant if the 95% confidence intervals (CI) do not include zero. All bias corrected 95% CI for the indirect effect excluded zero, indicating that in line with H1, endorsement of motherhood myths is a significant mediator of the relationship between sexism and opposition to women’s career in all countries.

Significance of the indirect effects was estimated using bootstrap analyses with 1000 bootstrapping resamples.

* p < .02,

*** p < .001.

In order to provide an overview of the proposed mediational model, we next present the analyses conducted on the total of the 16 countries retained. The hypothesized mediational model shows acceptable fit to the data, χ 2 (4, N = 38178) = 971.09, p < .001, CFI = .983, RMSEA = .08 [90% CI = .07, .08], SRMR = .04, AIC = 473476. Inspection of the fit indices of the first alternative model where endorsement of motherhood myths predicted sexism that, in turn, predicted opposition confirms that this alternative model shows poorer fit to the data than the proposed model, χ 2 (4, N = 38178) = 7583.1, p < .001, CFI = .870, RMSEA = .22 [90% CI = .21, .22], SRMR = .13, AIC = 480088. The second alternative model, where opposition to women’s career predicted motherhood myths shows poor fit to the data, χ 2 (5, N = 38178) = 14224.61, p < .001, CFI = .756, RMSEA = .27 [90% CI = .26, .27], SRMR = .21, AIC = 486728, and accordingly fits the data less well than the proposed mediational model, Δ χ 2 (1, 38178) = 13254 p < .001. As can be seen in Fig 1 , the standardized regression coefficient for the direct effect of sexism on opposition to women’s career is significant ( β = .16, p < .001). In addition, the unstandardized estimate for the indirect effect excludes zero (.13, SE = 0.003, bias corrected 95% CI [.12, .13]) and, therefore, is significant. Taken together, analyses conducted on the whole sample, as well as on each country separately, support our main assumption that endorsement of motherhood myths is a significant mediator of the relationship between sexism and opposition to women’s career.

The coefficient in parentheses represents parameter estimate for the total effect of prejudice on opposition to women’s career. *** p < .001.

Step 4. Moderated mediation analyses

Indirect effect through survey waves.

The moderated mediation model was estimated using a multiple group approach. This model exhibits good fit to the data, χ 2 (6, N = 38178) = 438.88, p < .001, CFI = .992, RMSEA = .06 [90% CI = .05, .06], SRMR = .01. The standardized coefficients for the total effect are .50 in the 2012 survey, and .52 in the 1994 survey. The unstandardized estimates for the indirect effect is .10, SE = 0.003, bias corrected 95% CI [.10, .11] in the 2012 survey, and .11, SE = 0.003, bias corrected 95% CI [.10, .11] in the 1994 survey. The intervals do not include zero, indicating that motherhood myths are a significant mediator of the relationship between sexism and opposition to women’s career in both survey waves. The difference between the indirect effect in 2012 and 1994 is not significant (-.003, SE = 0.004, bias corrected 95% CI [.-.01, .00]). We repeated the moderated mediation analysis in each country. As can be seen in Table 5 , the indirect effect reaches significance in each survey wave in all countries. The indirect effect is not moderated by the survey year, except in Great Britain where the indirect effect, although still significant, decreased between 1994 and 2012, and Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia where the indirect effect slightly increased between 1994 and 2012.

Significance of the indirect effects are estimated using bootstrap analyses with 1000 bootstrapping resamples.

* p < .05,

** p < .01,

Indirect effect as a function of the respondents’ gender

The moderated mediation model exhibits good fit to the data, χ 2 (6, N = 38124) = 402.46, p < .001, CFI = .993, RMSEA = .06 [90% CI = .05, .06], SRMR = .01. The total effect of sexism on opposition to women’s career is positive and significant for both men ( β = .52, p < .001) and women ( β = .50, p < .001). The standardized indirect effect of sexism on opposition to women’s career through motherhood myths is .27 in the male subsample, and .29 in the female subsample. The unstandardized estimates for the indirect effect is .11, SE = 0.003, bias corrected 95% CI [.10, 12] in the male sample, and .10, SE = 0.003, bias corrected 95% CI [.09, .10] in the female sample. The intervals do not include zero, indicating that motherhood myths are a significant mediator of the relationship between sexism and opposition to women’s career among both men and women respondents. The difference between the indirect effect among men and women is not statistically significant (.01, SE = 0.004, bias corrected 95% CI [.00, .01]). We repeated this analysis in each country separately (see Table 6 ). Results confirm that the indirect effect of sexism on opposition to women’s career through motherhood myths is not moderated by the respondents’ gender in 15 out of the 16 countries. The only exception is Poland. In this country, the indirect effect is stronger for the female than for the male respondents.

** p < .005,

Using a large representative sample of respondents from various countries the present research documented a psychosocial process of justification of discrimination against working women with children. As a preliminary step, hierarchical regression analysis established that sexism and motherhood myths predict opposition to women’s work, over and above gender, partnership, education, social status, religiosity and political orientation. Furthermore, structural equation modellings on the whole sample, as well as on each country separately, confirmed our main hypothesis that endorsement of motherhood myths mediates the relationship between sexism and opposition to women’s career following a birth. In addition, test of the moderated mediation indicated that the indirect effect reaches significance in each survey wave in almost all countries examined without substantial difference. Only in Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia did the indirect effect slightly increase between 1994 and 2012, suggesting that motherhood myths is more a justification for the expression of sexism nowadays than in the late 20 th century. Great Britain shows a reverse pattern with a slight decrease of the indirect effect between the two waves. However, besides these minor variations, it should be noted that motherhood myths remain a significant mediator of the sexism-opposition to women’s career relationship in all countries. The present research also considered participants' gender as a potential moderator of the indirect effect, and results indicated that the process of justification of discrimination against working women does not differ as a function of the respondents' gender. The only exception to this finding is Poland where the indirect effect is indeed stronger among women than among men. An examination of the specific features of female employment in this country sheds some light on this result. Young women in Poland are better educated than young men and are more likely to have permanent employment than men [ 77 ]. At the same time however, working women spend on average two and a half hours per day on unpaid work more than men—which is reflected by the fact that more than 1 in 3 women reduce their paid hours to part-time, while only 1 in 10 men do the same—and are predominant users of parental leave [ 3 ]. It is noteworthy that reduced working hours (and long periods of leave) hinders female career progression through less training, fewer opportunities for advancement, occupational segregation, and lower wages [ 78 , 79 ]. Accordingly, in Poland women earn 9% less than men (one of the lowest gender pay gap in OECD) but the pay gap reaches 22% by presence of children (above the OECD average of 16%; [ 77 ]). The fact that women appear even more inclined than men to rely on motherhood myths to justify gender discrimination is consistent with a system justification perspective [ 63 ]. Drawing on the logic of cognitive dissonance theory, system justification theory in its strong form posits that members of disadvantaged groups may be even more likely than members of advantaged groups to support existing social inequalities [ 64 ]. The rational is that members of disadvantaged groups would experience psychological discomfort stemming from the concurrent awareness of their ingroup's inferiority within the system, and of their ingroup's contribution to that system. Justification of the status quo would therefore reduce dissonance [ 80 ]. The finding that women strongly rely on motherhood myths to justify gender discrimination precisely in a country with strong motherhood penalty can be regarded as an expression of this system justification motive.

The present research sheds new light on the effect of macrolevel inequality on the justification of discrimination, and more broadly on the process of legitimation of gender inequalities [ 9 , 81 ]. In a recent study, Yu and Lee [ 82 ] found a negative association between women’s relative status in society and support for gender equality at home. More specifically, the authors found that although respondents in countries with smaller gender gaps express greater support for women’s participation in the labour force, they still exhibit less approval for egalitarian gender roles within the household, in particular regarding the share of domestic chores and childcare. As an explanation, the authors argued that the less traditional the gender division of labour is in a society, the more people need to express their freedom of maintaining these roles and to defend the gender system, leading to the endorsement of gender differentiation in the private sphere. However, the present research allows an alternative explanation for this seemingly paradoxical finding to be suggested. At a macrolevel, higher gender equality conveys strong suppressive factors (which reduce the expression of prejudice) by demonstrating that the society promotes egalitarianism between women and men. In parallel, the gender specialization in the division of the household responsibilities and especially regarding childcare provides a strong justifying factor (which releases prejudice) by emphasising essential differences between gender groups [ 26 ]. Thus, the counterintuitive finding that the more egalitarian a society is, the less people support gender equality at home may indeed reflect an attempt to justify the release of genuine sexism. Conversely, it is likely that a less egalitarian society brings with it some degree of tolerance towards gender discrimination, reducing the need to rely on justifications to express sexism. A closer look at our results regarding Norway and Japan supports this view. Norway and Japan appears as especially contrasted regarding gender equality, in particular with regard to economic participation and opportunity [ 1 ]. According to the World Economic Forum, Norway has the second smallest gender gap in the world. In addition, gender equality promotion is frequently mobilised both in political debates and in mainstream society [ 55 ]. For its part, Japan ranks 101 st on the overall gender gap index, which makes Japan well below average compared to other advanced industrial countries [ 83 ]. Besides this gender gap, consistent research reports a unique trivialisation of anti-gender equality discourses in the media [ 84 ] and of gender-based discriminatory behaviours in the workplace, including sexual harassment [ 85 ]. Comparing the strength of the indirect effect of sexism on opposition to women’s career through motherhood myths in these two countries ( Table 4 ), it is noteworthy that the coefficient is larger in Norway than in Japan. This result gives support to the assumption that macrolevel gender (in)equality affects the psychological process of justification at the individual level. Future studies should clarify how macrolevel inequalities impact societal norms, which in turn influence legitimation processes.

It is also worth noting that the justifying function of motherhood myths is established in all analysed countries despite some notable differences between parental leaves policies and practices. For instance, the United States are the only OECD country to offer no nationwide entitlement to paid leave, neither for mothers nor for fathers [ 86 ]. On the other hand, the Nordic nations, with Norway and Sweden in the lead, are in the vanguard of progressive policy-making regarding shared parental leave entitlement: Sweden was the first country in the world in 1974 to offer fathers the possibility of taking paid parental leave, quickly joined by Norway in 1978 [ 87 ]. More recently in 2007, Germany introduced a new law aiming at encouraging shared parental leave. In practice, the length of the financial support for parental leave can increase from 12 to 14 months provided that fathers use the parental benefit for at least 2 months. Recent research aiming at investigating whether German men who take parental leave are judged negatively in the workplace revealed that, in contrast with women who experience penalty for motherhood [ 40 ], fathers do not face backlash effect when they take a long parental leave [ 88 ]. The authors concluded that "gender role attitudes have changed". Tempering this view, the present study indicates that even in countries promoting incentives for fathers to take parental leave, motherhood myths—and specifically the belief that mother's work threatens the family—are still a justification for gender discrimination in the workplace. With regard to practices, it should be noted that shared parental leave policies, whose purpose is to foster gender equality in the labor market, often fail to meet this objective, with the majority of fathers actually taking the minimum length of leave entitlement, or no parental leave at all, and the majority of mothers still facing the majority of childcare [ 88 ]. Once again, more research is needed to document the process of mutual influences between changing family policies and the maintenance of the gender status quo via justifying beliefs.

Limitations and future directions

Although the hypothesized mediational process is supported by the data, and is in line with previous experimental findings [ 19 ], conclusion regarding causality are necessarily limited due to the correlational nature of the research. We hope that these preliminary findings will open the way to experimental studies allowing for a conclusion on the direction of causality between variables and the further documenting of the behavioural consequences of the endorsement of motherhood myths. For instance, future studies should consider the extent to which motherhood myths interact with organizational norms to constrain the hiring and promotion of women. Castilla and Benard [ 89 ] showed that when an organization explicitly values meritocracy, managers favour a male employee over an equally qualified female employee. One explanation for this seemingly paradoxical results lies in the legitimation function of meritocracy [ 17 ] which is likely to release the expression of sexism. We suggest that when organizations promote egalitarian norms, or put differently, when organizations set suppression factors, then motherhood myths may serve as a justification for unequal gender treatment regarding career outcomes.

Due to constraints related to the availability of data in the ISSP base, only one indicator was used to capture sexism. This can be regarded as a limitation providing that sexism is typically defined as a complex construct [ 20 ]. We argue that measuring the gender differentiation component of sexism through a single item represents a valid approach, as suggested by previous research indicating that single-item measures may be as reliable as aggregate scales [ 90 – 94 ]. However, using a multiple-item measure of sexism in future studies would provide a more comprehensive examination of the relations between the different components of sexism and opposition to gender equality in the workplace.

The present research focused on opposition to mothers' work as an indicator of gender discrimination. However, evidence suggests that motherhood myths may justify discrimination towards women as a whole rather than mothers only. First, as previously mentioned social roles create gender expectations [ 95 ] so that all women are expected to become mothers [ 47 ]. Furthermore, research using implicit association test indicate that people automatically associate women with family role [ 96 ]. As a consequence, it is plausible that employers rely on motherhood myths to discriminate against women in general regarding recruitement, performance evaluation, and rewards, arguing that women will sooner or later be less involved in work and less flexible for advancement than men [ 97 ]. This justification is compatible with the employers' reluctance to hire women and promote them to the highest positions even in the absence of productivity differences [ 98 ].

Practical implications

In this study we were able to document that motherhood myths are a widespread justification for gender discrimination in the workplace, including in countries with anti-discrimination laws and advanced family policies. From this regard, the present findings help understand the paradoxical effects of family-friendly policies on women's economic attainment. Mandel and Semyonov [ 99 ], using data from 20 countries, found evidence that family policies aimed at supporting women's economic independence, and including provision of childcare facilities and paid parental leaves, increase rather than decrease gender earning gaps. This unexpected effect is due to the fact that family policies are disproportionally used by mothers rather than fathers, with the consequence that mothers are concentrated in part-time employment, female-typed occupations, yet underrepresented in top positions. The authors concluded that "there are distinct limits to the scope for reducing gender wage inequality in the labor market as long as women bear the major responsibility for household duties and child care" (p. 965). We would add that there are strong barriers to the scope for attaining gender equality at home as long as motherhood myths are uncritically accepted and used as justification for unequal gender arrangements. Recent works provided evidence of the efficiency of interventions aimed at reducing sexist beliefs [ 100 ] and at recognizing everyday sexism [ 101 ]. In the same vain, interventions aimed at informing people that motherhood myths are socially constructed and maintained [ 33 ], and that they affect women's advancement and fathers' involvement [ 35 ], would represent a first step towards the reduction of discrimination by depriving individuals of a justification for gender inequalities.

The present research builds on and extends past findings by demonstrating that men and women rely on the belief that women’s work threatens the well-being of youth and family to justify discrimination against working women. If, at an individual level, this process allows discrimination to be exhibited without appearing prejudiced [ 10 ], at the group and societal levels, such a process may contribute to the legitimation and reinforcement of the hierarchical power structure [ 63 ]. By documenting a pervasive process by which people invoke motherhood myths to hinder women’s economic participation, the present research emphasizes the need to be vigilant about any attempts to promote a return to traditional gender roles, an issue of central importance given the contemporary rollback of women’s rights in advanced industrial countries [ 102 ].

Supporting information

All differences are significant at p < .001.

In Poland and Slovenia partial metric invariance of the measurement model was attained by setting free the loading of the item “ Do you think that women should work outside the home full-time , part-time or not at all after the youngest child starts school ?” on the “opposition” latent variable. This partly constrained model show good fit indices in Poland, χ 2 (7, N = 2248) = 36.18, p = .006, CFI = .990, RMSEA = .06 [90% CI = .04, .08], and Slovenia, χ 2 (7, N = 1867) = 12.92, p = .058, ns , CFI = .999, RMSEA = .03 [90% CI = .00, .05]. In the USA, partial metric invariance of the measurement model was attained by setting free the loading of the item “ All in all , family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job ” on the “motherhood myths” latent variable, χ 2 (7, N = 2117) = 11.08, p = .069, ns , CFI = .999, RMSEA = .02 [90% CI = .00, .04].

S1 Supplementary Information

Acknowledgments.

The authors are grateful to Virginie Bonnot, Cícero Pereira, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Funding Statement

This work was conducted at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and supported by a travel grant of the European Association for Social Psychology, http://www.easp.eu/ , and a travel grant of the Association pour la Diffusion de la Recherche en Psychologie Sociale, http://www.adrips.org/wp/ , attributed to the first author. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Sixteen defining moments for gender equality in 2021

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Originally published on un-women.medium.com

As 2021 comes to a close, we’re taking a look back at some of the major moments for gender equality and women’s rights from the past 12 months. From women at the forefront of the ongoing fight against COVID-19, to new laws to support survivors of gender-based violence, from women in the highest political offices to eliminating gender stereotypes in advertising, join us in celebrating some of the small and big strides for gender equality in 2021.

Power and politics

1. women reach highest levels of decision-making.

In 2021, eight countries have elected or sworn in their first woman Head of State or Government, with Barbados, Estonia and Moldova having women as President and Prime Minister for at least part of the year.

The year started off with Kaja Kallas taking office in January as Estonia ’s first woman Prime Minister. Samia Suluhu Hassan became Tanzania ’s first woman President in March. In May, Fiamē Naomi Mata'afa was elected Prime Minister of Samoa . June saw Robinah Nabbanja nominated to the role of Prime Minister of Uganda .

Najla Bouden Ramadhane was named Tunisia ’s Prime Minister in September, making her the first woman to lead a country in the Arab region. After a 2020 decision that Barbados would become a Republic, the first presidential election held in October 2021 saw Sandra Mason become the country’s first-ever female President.

Sweden ’s parliament voted in Magdalena Andersson as Prime Minister in November . In December, Xiomara Castro was elected President of Honduras; she will officially take office in 2022.

Overall, 2021 was a good year for women in politics. Albania has a record-setting 70 per cent women cabinet, Germany got its first gender-equal cabinet, and Iraq and Kosovo exceeded their gender quotas for parliament. In January Kamala Harris took office as the first woman Vice President of the United States . Harris is notably also the first Black-American and Asian-American to fill the role.

. @KamalaHarris is the first woman, first Black and first South Asian Vice President of the United States. Here's to many more moments like this around the world. #GenerationEquality #Inauguration2021 pic.twitter.com/otqPsiQKti — UN Women (@UN_Women) January 20, 2021

2. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala becomes the first woman and first African to lead the World Trade Organization

In March, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala took office as the Director-General of the World Trade Organization , making her both the first woman and the first African to hold this position in the organization’s 26-year history.

Okonjo-Iweala is no stranger to shattering glass ceilings, having been the first woman to become Nigeria’s Finance Minister and Foreign Minister.

On March 1, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria will take over as the WTO’s next Director-General. She makes history as the 1st woman and 1st African to head the organization @NOIweala #WTODG Learn more: https://t.co/yfDhNhERs5 pic.twitter.com/nEyRTFxPBO — WTO (@wto) February 20, 2021

Laws and policy

3. spain strengthens rape laws.

Spain approved a bill defining all non-consensual sex as rape , in a move meant to centre survivors and toughen penalties for perpetrators.

The new legislation comes in the wake of the 2016 “wolf pack” gang rape case, which sparked national outrage.  Based on a “yes means yes” model, it will require explicit consent for sexual acts. Spain joins 11 other European countries who have expanded their legal definition of rape in this way. 

The bill also reclassifies street harassment and female genital mutilation as criminal offenses and introduces imprisonment for work-related sexual harassment.

4. Lebanon makes progress towards ending child marriage

The Higher Islamic Council in Lebanon approved a Family Law amendment , including a new chapter on the marriage of minors. The new legislation bans the marriage of children under the age of 15 and stipulates that girls must give their consent to marry, or else the marriage can be annulled.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 100 million girls were expected to marry before their 18th birthday in the next decade. Now, due to the economic shocks, insecurity and school closures,  up to 10 million more girls  are at risk of becoming child brides, unless countries around the world take urgent action to drive change.

Ending child marriage – any formal marriage or informal union involving a child under the age of 18 – is part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals .

In 🇱🇧, the Higher Islamic Council has modified its personal status law to ban the marriage of children below the age of 15, with a recommendation to ensure 18 years of age for marriage. This is an important step towards ending #ChildMarriage in the country pic.twitter.com/ka0zCDclUC — UN Women Lebanon (@unwomenlebanon) May 4, 2021

5. Marriage equality advances around the world

Switzerland announced that same-sex couples would be able to marry or convert their registered partnerships into marriage in the country, following a popular vote on the subject in September when 64.1 per cent supported same-sex marriage. In December, Chile’s Congress passed a law to legalize same-sex marriage, becoming the 31 st country where same-sex marriage is legal.

While there are still 69 countries that have laws criminalizing homosexuality and a long way to go until there is universal recognition that love is love, 2021 saw some promising moves to decriminalize same-sex partnerships. In February, Angola signed into law a revised penal code to allow same-sex relationships and ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. With a landmark decision in March, a Japanese court ruled that the government's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional, paving the way for marriage equality.

PERIOD. pic.twitter.com/e26Cz8UMzt — UN Women (@UN_Women) December 22, 2021

6. Chile sets new gender equality standard in constitutional drafting

In May, Chile elected the world’s first gender-equal constitutional assembly , which activists say could help set a new global standard.

Chile’s current constitution, drafted in 1980 during the Pinochet dictatorship, does guarantee non-discrimination based on sex, but does not ensure women’s rights within marriage and restricts their sexual and reproductive rights. It has also been criticized for failing to provide healthcare, education, and other social protections.

Calls for a new constitution were amplified during a popular uprising in October 2019, and an overwhelming 79 per cent of Chileans voted in favor of a constitutional assembly with gender parity.

Science and technology

7. women continue leading covid-19 research and response.

Nearly two years since COVID-19 was declared to be a pandemic, every corner of the world has felt the devastating impacts of the virus. As health and care workers, women and girls have been on the front lines of response, but they have also been leaders in research and innovation. Throughout 2021, vaccine rollouts increased around the world, thanks to many women scientists and experts.

From teenager Amika Chebrolu’s research on the lead molecule to selectively bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and inhibit the virus, to the critical research pioneered by women researchers like Kizzmekia Corbett , Katalin Karikó , Özlem Türeci and others, the distribution of vaccines around the world has been a critical tool in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic.

These five women are leading the fight against the pandemic. 📕 Read more: https://t.co/RwogjUQ88D pic.twitter.com/sVLZrH7hXg — World Economic Forum (@wef) March 16, 2021

8. New Nasdaq policy requires diversity on company boards

A new policy requires that the roughly 3.000 companies publicly traded through Nasdaq, the US-owned electronic stock exchange, have at least one woman on their board of directors . A recent review found that about 75 per cent of the Nasdaq listed companies, primarily tech-related and growth companies, did not meet the threshold.

The new policy, a major step in assuring women’s leadership in private-sector leadership, also requires racial diversity, and the inclusion of at least one board member who self-identifies as LGBTIQ+.

9. Recognizing the contributions of Henrietta Lacks

In October, the World Health Organization honoured the legacy of Henrietta Lacks , a Black American woman and mother. Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, but cells taken from her, without her knowledge or consent, were commercialized and distributed around the world.

The HeLa cells have contributed to nearly 75,000 studies, paving the way in advancements across medicine including polio vaccines, HIV/AIDS medications and breakthroughs in in-vitro fertilization and vital COVID-18 research.

By recognizing Henrietta Lacks’ life and legacy, WHO is calling for collective action to rectify and eliminate inequality and unjust disparities in global health.

Thank you, Henrietta Lacks! Today @DrTedros honoured Henrietta Lacks posthumously with a WHO Director-General’s award, acknowledging her story - one of inequity - and recognizing her world-changing legacy to science and health https://t.co/vVx1Hn52lO pic.twitter.com/rshT1shwfn — World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) October 13, 2021

10. The most gender-equal Olympics

With a year of delay because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics kicked off on 23 July 2021 with almost 49 per cent of participating athletes being women, making it the most gender-balanced Games in history.

For the first time, there was at least one female and one male athlete in each of the teams participating in the Games, and a sporting schedule that gave equal visibility for men and women’s events during primetime hours. The first modern Olympic Games held in 1896 in Athens did not feature a single female competitor.

Did you know? This year's @Olympics was the most gender-balanced games in history and a landmark for gender balance in sport! #Tokyo2020 👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/6N09OhhzlO — UN Women (@UN_Women) August 18, 2021

Arts and entertainment

11. women directors finally get more recognition.

Chloé Zhao made history this year at the Oscars, when she became the first woman of colour and the first woman of Asian descent to earn best director at the Academy Awards . The "Nomadland" director was only the second woman to win the award, following the footsteps of Kathryn Bigelow, who won for directing "Hurt Locker" in 2010. This was also the first year ever that two women were nominated for best director. In fact, during the 93-year history of the Oscars, only seven women have been nominated in the director category, including 2021 nominees, Zhao and Fennell.

The Golden Globe awards also recognized women directors’ achievements with three women who have been nominated in the best director category. This was the first time more than one woman has been shortlisted in a single year. Previously, only five women were ever nominated in the 77-year awards history.

Join us in celebrating Chloé Zhao who became the first woman of color, and second woman ever to win the #Oscar for directing! Only 7 women have been recognized in the #Oscars director category. #HERstory pic.twitter.com/w17kb8mNZR — UN Women (@UN_Women) April 26, 2021

12. A Dutch museum permanently features women artists

For the first time in its 200-year history, the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam announced that three 17 th century paintings by women artists will be placed on permanent display.  

The three works, The Serenade by Judith Leyster, the Memorial Portrait of Moses ter Borch by Gesina ter Borch and Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase by Rachel Ruysch, are now on display in the Gallery of Honour, alongside

13. Lego announces the end of gender bias in their toys

Following a global survey commissioned by Lego and conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the Danish company announced they’ll take steps towards removing gender-bias in their toys and marketing, including stopping the use of labelling toys ‘for girls’ or ‘for boys’.

Lego will also work to expand the diversity of characters and roles represented in their products, in the hopes of every child being able to identify with the toys.

Women leading action

14. generation equality forum sets course to accelerate action.

Kicking off in March in Mexico, and concluding in Paris in July, the Generation Equality Forum brought together governments, civil society, philanthropy, private sector and youth activists and launched a five-year action journey to drive progress towards gender equality. With nearly USD 40 billion in investments , as well as ambitious policy and programme commitments, the Forum convened by UN Women and co-hosted by the governments of France and Mexico, marks a critical moment in women’s rights and equality movements, especially as the world assesses the impact of COVID-19.

🎬That’s a wrap! 🎬 The #GenerationEquality Forum Paris concluded today with nearly $40 billion of investments for gender equality. Thank you to all those who joined us. #ActForEqual pic.twitter.com/helEepS6u7 — UN Women (@UN_Women) July 2, 2021

15. Maria Ressa wins Nobel Peace Prize

Maria Ressa, alongside Dmitry Muratov, was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in safeguarding freedom of expression. Ressa, the co-founder of the digital media company dedicated to investigative journalism, has long used her work as a journalist and author to expose abuses of power in the Philippines.

Ressa is the 18th woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception in 1901, and the first person from the Philippines.

There was only one more woman who won the #NobelPrize this year. The underrepresentation of women needs to change. Who is a woman that you would like to see win the @NobelPrize ? pic.twitter.com/4eyUeWPWDO — UN Women (@UN_Women) October 9, 2021

16. Afghan women speak truth to power

On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, drastically impacting the lives of all Afghans, especially Afghan women and girls. Girls are banned from attending secondary school, women are unable to continue work, and violence against women is on the rise.

Against all odds, many Afghan women took to the streets in protest. Others persisted to speak out in different ways, to safeguard their human rights. One delegation travelled to New York to participate in a series of high-level meetings at the United Nations Headquarters on the sidelines of the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security. The group, including parliamentarians, women’s rights advocates, journalists, civil society leaders and researchers, called for women’s full and equal participation in humanitarian assistance, peace efforts, and governance.

"Afghan women will never give up on their rights... And UN Women will never stop walking along side them." @unwomenafghan Deputy Representative, @DavidianAli on our commitment to #StayAndDeliver support to women and girls in #Afghanistan . pic.twitter.com/grrO0qN4mI — UN Women (@UN_Women) October 18, 2021

• Laws, legislation
• Gender equality and women’s empowerment
• Leadership and political participation

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Speech: We are not deterred – Let us push forward together for gender equality

Stop Blaming Women for Gender Inequality

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We know that women attempting to advance in their careers are dogged at every step by bias in evaluations and promotions . The higher a woman climbs on the corporate ladder, the worse the unfairness becomes. In the majority of cases, she hits the glass ceiling before reaching the executive suite, unless we are talking about executive roles like HR and investor relations that are seen as typical female niches.

There are still those who are unwilling to acknowledge the centrality of bias in limiting women’s career options. One common counterargument (a favourite among cultural conservatives) stresses the career choices women and men freely make. From early adulthood, professional women supposedly place family on par with career and plan their lives accordingly, whereas men go all-in on supporting their family through career advancement. Gender equality activists, the argument suggests, are fighting human nature.

There is a somewhat more “empowering” variant of the same logic that you may be familiar with if you read the bestselling book Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead . Instead of generalising about women’s life aspirations, author Sheryl Sandberg argues that women’s lack of belief in themselves prevents them vying with men for the best jobs. She acknowledges gender bias but offers career advice for overcoming it, which implies that it needn’t be addressed head-on. Bias hurts women only if they allow it to. This could be seen as a form of “blaming the victim” under the guise of empowering her.

It is fair to say that the discussion of that book is a sideshow for most women with careers. They care about the hiring and promotion decisions that they are exposed to, and they doubt that these are fair. That makes sense: why should they be treated any different from the others? Chances are that they have been hit by unfair promotion criteria at some point in their career.

Leaning out: An alternate theory

However, the two explanations for gender inequality at the top – bias on one hand, women’s failure of will on the other – are not mutually exclusive, as research by Raina Brands and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo in Administrative Science Quarterly reveals. Experience within a biased system, the researchers show, weakens the willingness to put oneself out there only to be unjustly rejected one more time.

Using data from an executive search firm in the United Kingdom, they looked at how candidates of both genders responded to losing out on a top role. Women candidates, they found, were much more likely than men not to pursue further opportunities from the head hunters after being rejected previously. Delving deeper, the researchers found that women’s aversion to applying again was strongly linked to the sense of not having been treated fairly the first time around. Finally, they launched an experiment where 160 senior executives were asked to either accept or reject a hypothetical candidate for an executive role, then “put themselves in the candidate’s shoes” and answer questions on the perceived fairness of the process as well as complete an “executive sense of belonging” questionnaire.

According to the researchers, the combined outcomes of all three studies present an alternate theory of what causes potential women leaders to “lean out” instead of in. Exposure to unfair treatment in the business environment causes women (as a disfavoured group among the executive class) to despair of ever being treated fairly, to feel they will never belong in the world they aspire to join, and ultimately to pass up the chances that come their way.

Unfairness hurts firms

It turns out that people adapt their behaviour to the fairness of the system . If they are treated fairly, they will reach for opportunities. If they are given signals that they belong in a group, they seek to join it. And once you think about those two mechanisms, it is obvious what happens to women seeking executive positions. They are not treated fairly and not made to feel they belong, and the rejections from positions that they (often) should have gained discourages them from reaching for new opportunities. After all, who plays a losing hand? Naturally this accumulates over time, because more experience means more rejection, so the women exactly best placed to become executives are most likely to think they cannot reach that level.

This is not just a story about women. Unfair treatment can hold back any group in the short run. In the longer run, it creates discouragement and resentment, and the members of the group hold themselves back. They are leaning out of the unfair system, looking for better places to work. The labour market gets split as they avoid the career paths with unfair treatment, and organisations need to fill their positions from an increasingly narrow and less talented pool of applicants. Any firm that shows through its hiring that it has a problem with female, black, Muslim, and Hispanic job applicants will learn the long-term consequences of narrow hiring.

Henrich R. Greve  is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD and a co-author of  Network Advantage: How to Unlock Value from Your Alliances and Partnerships. You can read his blog .

Follow INSEAD Knowledge on Twitter and Facebook

About the author(s)

Henrich greve.

is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD and the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chaired Professor in Entrepreneurship. He is also a co-author of  Network Advantage: How to Unlock Value from Your Alliances and Partnerships . You can read his  blog  here.

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All The Arguments You Need: To Convince Doubters of Feminism

For the next time you hear, “If feminism is about gender equality why isn’t it called human-ism?”

In our All The Arguments You Need series, we take on mindsets standing in the way of progress and rebut them with facts and logic.

One of the most prominent aspects of my identity is that I am a feminist. To me, it is not only a personal belief, but also a political fight. When I identify myself as a feminist in social settings, I have noticed it almost serves as an invitation for sexists, doubters and Devil’s advocates to engage me in debates. They come armed with arguments against feminism consisting of myths, misunderstandings, and misconstructions. I don’t have a problem participating in a discourse about feminism. It is only when we talk to those who are in the dark about the movement, those who are on the fence about it, and those who are on the other side of the line, that we can achieve the goal of gender equality. But, this involves, on my part, constant engagement and a burden to educate — nay, convince — people that the advocacy of social, economic and political equality of all genders is valid and logically grounded in statistics and experiential evidence. It is exhausting to have to draw constantly on my lived experiences and recollect relevant research — only to be met with straw-man arguments and a condescending “Why are you getting worked up?”

If you’ve ever been in my place, and have wished you had facts and hard data to debunk some of the more absurd arguments against feminism thrown at you, here’s a quick primer for the next time it happens (which, it will).

“Where is the inequality? Men and women are already equal.”

According to the United Nations, one in three women is beaten , forced into sex or abused by an intimate partner. On each day of 2017, 137 women were killed by a family member. Women and girls together account for 71% of all human trafficking . A woman is raped every 13 minutes in India.

These are violent, obvious manifestations of inequality. We can see more subtle sexism in the fact that women’s clothes aren’t designed for them , school textbooks still propagate sexist stereotypes, 131 million girls are out of school globally, 113 countries don’t have laws to ensure equal pay for equal work , the majority of women in the Indian workforce earn roughly  Rs. 62 for every Rs. 100 that men earn, while doing 10 times more unpaid labor than men do — the list really does go on. And, that is a fact, too: According to the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Gender Gap  report , at the current rate of progress, it will take another 108 years to reach gender parity. So, no; men and women are not already equal. This argument against feminism also resorts to the male-female binary, excluding transgender, gender-non-conforming and gender-fluid persons, which is simply the wrong way to go about discussing gender equality. On that front, too, we are lacking: Half of all transgender people are sexually abused at least once in their lifetime; 92% of the socio-economically challenged trans community cannot participate in India’s formal economy to this day. So, again, no; feminism is nowhere close to achieving its goal of equality. It’s going to take a minute.

“Women and men are biologically different, so how can they be equal?”

Sure, there are undeniable physiological differences between the two, but men and women don’t have different brains with different proclivities to certain vocations. Research has also found that men and women are essentially alike in terms of personality, cognitive ability, and leadership potential. Any difference between men and women is a part of socialization and not genetic coding . So, women aren’t missing from STEM fields because they’re ‘natural caregivers.’ Their absence is more likely because of structural barriers such as unfair parental leave policies in the workplace, or the fact that 71% of women field researchers  have received inappropriate sexual remarks and 26% have reported experiencing sexual assault. If the counter to this argument against feminism is that men are stronger than women and carry out tasks that women can’t, that is also flawed. Men and women possess different kinds of physical strength; men have fast-twitch muscles that are good for actions like lifting and moving heavy objects, while women have slow-twitch muscles giving them the strength of endurance good for, say, assembly line jobs. Besides, statements such as “men are stronger than women” are missing a qualifier: Most men are stronger than women.

“What about male problems like high suicide rates and false rape charges? Feminism is just sexist against men.”

Men’s significantly higher suicide rate is directly linked to the fact that they are  far less likely  than women to seek support for mental health problems. This is because they are brought up in a world in which they can’t express emotions freely on account of it being perceived as a feminine trait. Feminism seeks to retire all gender stereotypes and inequality, which would help everyone, regardless of sex and gender. This means issues such as violence against men will be taken more seriously because it will be divorced from the idea that masculinity means being invulnerable. As for false rape accusations, approximately only 2% to 5%  of all sexual assault accusations are false. That means, 98% of times, women are telling the truth. As unfortunate and illegal the cases of false charges may be, to expect feminists to drop the fight for equality is unreasonable and based only on the logically redundant argumentative technique: whataboutery. Finally, feminism can’t be sexist towards men because of how oppression works . It has a unidirectional, systemic flow, from a group at the top that has social and cultural sanction to misuse power, toward the group at the bottom. Patriarchy hurts everyone — even men — but as long as men are in a greater position of social power that allows them to oppress women culturally, socially, legally and financially, they can’t be victims of sexism.

Related on The Swaddle:

All the Arguments You Need: To Convince Doubters of #MeToo

“Feminist women are so angry and aggressive. Why can’t they relax?”

Of course, we’re angry. We are conditioned from day one to conform to a certain norm of femininity . We get harassed on the streets. We get raped, abused and killed disproportionately. We don’t get equal access to education and opportunity as men get, and when we do, we don’t get paid as much as they do for the same job. Our reproductive rights are heavily regulated by men who conveniently dominate most decision-making roles. We are objectified and sexualized to the extent that entire multi-billion dollar industries, such as fashion and make-up, thrive on women’s insecurities. All of these drivers of inequality are exasperating and very personal, lived experiences for us. It’s not just an intellectual exercise for us to talk about these things repeatedly. So, of course, we’ll get angry sometimes, as people do. But feelings and fact are not mutually exclusive — yet another untruth patriarchy has given us. Feminist women having feelings does not negate the entire movement. According to one study , asking women not to “make everything about feminism,” and insinuating that they are somehow overdoing it in demanding gender equality and respect, is itself a more recent manifestation of modern sexist behavior.

“If feminism cares about equality, why is it called feminism? Why not egalitarianism or human-ism?”

‘Humanism,’ it seems, has come up as an alternative simply because it sounds a little bit like feminism and, phonetically, it gives the sense that it might mean being in favor of all of humanity having equal rights. But that’s just misconception. Humanism is a branch of philosophy and ethics that says that the source of human morality isn’t God but humanity’s capacity to be logical and triumph over dogma. So… that’s why feminism isn’t called humanism.

Egalitarianism is a school of political thought that says that all human beings are fundamentally equal and therefore should have equal rights to all resources. Sure, in that regard, egalitarianism has informed feminism by being a broader view of the fight for equality. But egalitarianism has had its heyday and has been dormant as a social movement for a while now, and yet egalitarian laws and practices have not succeeded in elevating the position of women in society. This is why we need something more — why we need feminism.

Unlike egalitarianism, feminism is a social movement that is inherently about action; it’s about tackling the world as it is right now, in which one particular gender is being oppressed. If all goes well, hopefully, we will all be able to call ourselves egalitarians. But until then, we need something specific to solve the problem of wide-ranging discrimination against women and other gender identities. Feminism got the name because it started as a socio-political movement advocating for women’s rights based on the premise that gender, specifically, is not an acceptable basis for discrimination or oppression. Through its own chain of reasoning, it has evolved into a movement for equal rights of all genders, which at no point takes away from any other human rights movement.

“I believe in equal rights of all genders but I don’t call myself a feminist.”

Too late. That’s literally the definition: You are a feminist.

Pallavi Prasad is The Swaddle's Features Editor. When she isn't fighting for gender justice and being righteous, you can find her dabbling in street and sports photography, reading philosophy, drowning in green tea, and procrastinating on doing the dishes.

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How To Debunk These Common Wage Gap Arguments

April 4 is Equal Pay Day, and as such, media focus on the wage gap between American men and women will intensify. Despite the attempts to raise awareness about the continued existence of the wage gap, however, people will all too often dismiss them, or in some frustrating cases try to argue about it with you. There are tons of arguments about the pay gap that people may make — but luckily, you can pretty easily argue against each one.

Refuting the existence of the gender pay gap seems to be a favorite pastime of men's rights activists , conservative think tanks , and random Twitter users alike. To them, exposing the "feminist conspiracy" behind Equal Pay Day and the push to close the gender wage gap seems to be very important, and they love to argue about it. Their reasons for doing so are as individual as they are, and given that there are women who promote this belief , it's overly simplistic to just blame it on sexism.

Luckily, we've got you covered on eight of the most common false arguments against the pay gap and tips on how to debunk each one when and if you encounter them on this otherwise-excellent awareness-raising day.

1. "Women Are A Protected Group."

This type of derailing comment is used to dismiss your argument on the basis of a different but related fact. Women are considered a "protected class" under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but are still not in the U.S. Constitution . It also doesn't matter if women are protected under the EEO — the wage gap persists in spite of it.

2. "Women Make 79 Cents For Each Dollar Men Make."

Many surface-level arguments in favor of pay equality state that women make 79 cents for each dollar a man makes. That leaves out an entirely different factor that's divided feminists — that white women earn 79 cents for each dollar a white man makes, but that the statistics are much worse for women of color. Rebutting this is easy in theory, but can get difficult if you come up against someone who refuses to see race. Remind them that things are indeed statistically worse for women of color, and that brown and Black women experience the worst end of this.

3. "Black Men Make More Than White Women."

It's amazing that arguments by primarily white feminists which attempt to pit Black men against white women still exist with all we know now about the historical use of white womanhood in racist ideology . All the same, this argument — whose basis I haven't been able to identify — lives on. The rebuttal to this argument is based in Pew research which shows that white women continue to make slightly more than Black men , and that both still make less than white men.

4. "Women Just Have Different Priorities Than Men."

This infuriating argument seems to get at the inherent sexism in arguments against the gender pay gap. By this reasoning, women simply want different things out of life than men — we prefer to have and raise kids rather than have successful careers . There's so much wrong with that stance that it's almost absurd. Anyone who's ever known a non-maternal woman knows that clearly, not all women want kids, and that wanting to have a family isn't the sole desire of women. You can respond to that argument by reiterating that having kids isn't women's work, that not all women want families, and that having kids shouldn't mean someone makes less than someone else on the basis of gender.

5. "A Female CEO Makes More Than A Male Construction Worker."

I've heard this derailing attempt from single-issue activists who only focus on classism without taking race or gender into account. To this type of person, the wage gap simply couldn't be real because there are men out there who make less than female CEOs. That's like saying someone slowly suffocating doesn't have it as bad as someone else whose house is on fire.

The rebuttal to this derailment is also based in research — yes, working-class and blue-collar jobs do obviously pay much less than white-collar jobs and especially executive positions, but women in blue-collar communities continue to experience pay gaps in comparison to the men who are also in their communities. Classism certainly plays a role, but the existence of female CEOs doesn't erase the existence of the gender pay gap.

6. "Women Choose Lower-Paying Jobs."

This lovely derailment is complicated to respond to because there is evidence to suggest that some women do indeed choose lower-paying fields than men . This doesn't negate the fact that women can and do still make less in the same fields as men — including those "low-paying fields" that women supposedly choose at higher rates than their male counterparts. You can respond to this by reminding the person you're speaking to that women often earn less in the same jobs as men regardless of field.

7. "Young Women Excel And Even Make More Than Men In Some Fields."

Here we have a rebuttal to the existence of the gender pay gap that appears to be based in the "men are oppressed by women" rhetoric of "men's rights activists." This one is often linked to a claim made by the conservative pundit Genevieve Wood who claimed that childless young women in large cities "are actually outperforming males" who have otherwise-similar lives. Politifact ruled this argument "mostly true," but a good response to it is that while young (and probably white) women without kids may be making more than their male counterparts in big cities, that doesn't change things for women of color, women with kids, rural women, or older women . These women all continue to experience the wage gap at disproportionate rates compared to young, childless white women in major metropolitan areas.

8. "The Wage Gap Is A Myth."

And here we have it, folks — the blatant belief behind most of the aforementioned arguments against the existence of the gender pay gap. Unfortunately, this very simplistic belief persists because people keep writing articles about why the wage gap is supposedly a myth . In recent years, proponents of this "wage gap myth" have been women, which may legitimize it in the eyes of those who just won't let this argument die.

When and if someone says this to you (and if you get into it publicly or on Facebook, they almost certainly will), direct them to the Pew report published the day before Equal Pay Day 2017. The pay gap appears to be narrowing , but it definitely still exists. Remind them again that when race is taken into account, the gap widens significantly. Be a broken record until they either give up or you get it into their heads that this gap exists and needs to be addressed for full racial and gender equality.

Like every other feminist awareness day, arguments can and will abound that aim to refute everything you believe in. Don't let it get to you — you have these eight arguments up your sleeve to prove to them that you know what you're talking about.

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Equality Arguments for Abortion Rights

Introduction.

Roe v. Wade grounds constitutional protections for women’s decision wheth­er to end a pregnancy in the Due Process Clauses. 1   But in the four decades since Roe , the U.S. Supreme Court has come to recognize the abortion right as an equality right as well as a liberty right.  In this Essay, we describe some distinctive features of equality arguments for abortion rights.  We then show how, over time, the Court and individual Justices have begun to employ equal­ity arguments in analyzing the constitutionality of abortion restrictions.  These arguments first appear inside of substantive due process case law, and then as claims on the Equal Protection Clause.  Finally, we explain why there may be inde­­­pendent political significance in grounding abortion rights in equality values.

Before proceeding, we offer two important caveats.  First, in this brief Essay we discuss equality arguments that Supreme Court justices have recognized—not arguments that social movement activists made in the years before Roe , that academics made in their wake, or that ordinary Americans might have made then or might make now.  Second, we address, separately, arguments based on the Due Process Clauses and the Equal Protection Clause.  In most respects but one, 2 however, we emphasize that a constitutional interpreter’s attention to the social organization of reproduction could play a more important role in de­termining the permissibility of various abortion-restrictive regulations than the particular constitutional clause on which an argument is based.

I. Equality Arguments for Abortion Rights

Equality arguments are also concerned about the gendered impact of abortion restrictions.  Sex equality arguments observe that abortion restrictions deprive women of control over the timing of motherhood and so predictably exacerbate the inequalities in educational, economic, and political life engen­dered by childbearing and childrearing.  Sex equality arguments ask whether, in protecting unborn life, the state has taken steps to ameliorate the effects of compelled motherhood on women, or whether the state has proceeded with indifference to the impact of its actions on women. 5   Liberty arguments focus less on these gendered biases and burdens on women.

To be clear, equality arguments do not suppose that restrictions on abor­tio­n are only about women.  Rather, equality arguments are premised on the view that restrictions on abortion may be about both women and the unborn— both and .  Instead of assuming that restrictions on abortion are entirely benign or entirely invidious, equality analysis entertains the possibility that gender stereotypes may shape how the state pursues otherwise benign ends.  The state may protect unborn life in ways it would not, but for stereotypical assumptions about women’s sexual or maternal roles.

For example, the state’s bona fide interest in protecting potential life does not suffice to explain the traditional form of criminal abortion statutes in America.  Such statutes impose the entire burden of coerced childbirth on preg­­nant women and provide little or no material support for new mothers.  In this way, abortion restrictions reflect views about how it is “natural” and appropriate for a woman to respond to a pregnancy.  If abortion restrictions were not prem­ised on these views, legislatures that sought to coerce childbirth in the name of protecting life would bend over backwards to provide material support for the wo­men who are required to bear—too often alone—the awesome physical, emotional, and financial costs of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing. 6   Only by viewing pregnancy and motherhood as a part of the natural order can a leg­islature dismiss these costs as modest in size and private in nature.  Nothing about a desire to protect fetal life compels or commends this state of affairs.  When abortion restrictions reflect or enforce traditional sex-role stereotypes, equality arguments insist that such restrictions are suspect and may violate the U.S. Constitution.

II. Equality Arguments in Legal Doctrine

While Roe locates the abortion right in the Due Process Clauses, the Supreme Court has since come to conceive of it as an equality right as well as a liberty right.  The Court’s case law now recognizes equality arguments for the abortion right based on the Due Process Clauses.  Additionally, a growing num­ber of justices have asserted equality arguments for the abortion right inde­pendently based on the Equal Protection Clause.

A. Equality Arguments for Abortion Rights and the Due Process Clauses

The Court has also invoked equality concerns to make sense of the Due Process Clauses in the area of abortion rights.  The opinion of the Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey 11 is shaped to a sub­stantial degree by equality values.  At the very moment in Casey when the Court reaffirms constitutional protection for abortion rights, the Court ex­plains that a pregnant woman’s “suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture.” 12   This emphasis on the role autonomy of the pregnant woman reflects the in­fluence of the equal protection sex discrimination cases, which prohibit the government from en­forcing stereotypical roles on women.  Likewise, in the stare decisis passages of Casey , the Court emphasizes, as a reason to reaffirm Roe , that “[t]he ability of women to participate equally in the economic and so­cial life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their re­productive lives.” 13   Here, as elsewhere in Casey , the Court is interpreting the Due Process Clause and draw­ing on equality values in order to make sense of the substance of the right.

The equality reasoning threading through Casey is not mere surplusage.  Equality values help to identify the kinds of restrictions on abortion that are unconstitutional under Casey ’s undue burden test.  As the joint opinion applies the test, abortion restrictions that deny women’s equality impose an undue burden on women’s fundamental right to decide whether to become a mother.  Thus, the Casey Court upheld a twenty-four-hour waiting period, but struck down a spousal notification provision that was eerily reminiscent of the com­mon law’s enforcement of a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.  Just as the law of coverture gave husbands absolute dominion over their wives, so “[a] State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children.” 14   An equality-informed understanding of Casey ’s undue burden test prohibits government from coercing, manipulating, misleading, or stereotyping pregnant women.

B. Equality Arguments for Abortion Rights and the Equal Protection Clause

In Carhart , Justice Ginsburg invoked equal protection cases—including Virginia —to counter woman-protective arguments for restricting access to abortion, which appear in the majority opinion.  Woman-protective arguments are premised on certain judgments about women’s nature and decisional com­petence. 22 But the equal protection precedents that Justice Ginsburg cited are responsive both to woman-protective and to fetal-protective anti-abortion ar­guments.  As Justice Blackmun’s Casey opinion illustrates, equality arguments are concerned that gender assumptions shape abortion restrictions, even when genuine concern about fetal life is present.

C. What About Geduldig ?

Equality arguments complement liberty arguments, and are likely to travel together.  There is therefore little reason to reach the abstract question of wheth­er, if Roe and Casey were overruled, courts applying existing equal protection doc­trine would accord constitutional protection to decisions concerning abortion .

Proponents of equality arguments have long regarded the state’s reg­ulation of pregnant women as suspect—as potentially involving problems of sex-role stereotyping.  But in one of its early equal protection sex discrimination decisions, the Court reasoned about the regulation of pregnancy in ways not necessarily consistent with this view.  In Geduldig , the Court upheld a California law that provided workers comprehensive disability insurance for all tempo­rarily disabling conditions that might prevent them from working, except preg­nancy.  According to the conventional reading of Geduldig , the Court held categorically that the regulation of pregnancy is never sex based, so that such reg­ulation warrants very deferential scrutiny from the courts.

The conventional wisdom about Geduldig , however, is incorrect.  The Geduldig Court did not hold that governmental regulation of pregnancy never qualifies as a sex classification.  Rather, the Geduldig Court held that governmen­tal regulation of pregnancy does not always qualify as a sex classification. 24   The Court acknowledged that “distinctions involving pregnancy” might inflict “an invidious discrimination against the members of one sex or the other.” 25   This reference to invidiousness by the Geduldig Court is best understood in the same way that Wendy Williams’s brief in Geduldig used the term “invidious”—namely, as referring to traditional sex-role stereotypes. 26   Particularly in light of the Court’s recognition in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs 27 that pregnant women are routinely subject to sex-role stereotyping, 28 Geduldig should be read to say what it actually says, not what most commentators and courts have assumed it to say.

Geduldig was decided at the dawn of the Court’s sex discrimination case law and at the dawn of the Court’s modern substantive due process jurispru­dence.  The risk of traditional sex-role stereotyping and stereotyping around preg­­nancy was developed more fully in later cases, including in twenty-five years of litigation over the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. 29   This explains why, when Hibbs was decided in 2003, the Court could reason about pregnancy in ways that the Geduldig Court contemplated in theory but could not register in fact.

III. The Political Authority of the Equal Protection Clause

We have thus far considered the distinctive concerns and grounds of equal­­ity arguments, which enable them to complement liberty arguments for abor­tion rights.  We close by considering some distinctive forms of political authority that equality arguments confer.

Some critics pejoratively refer to certain of the Court’s Due Process deci­sions as recognizing “unenumerated” constitutional rights.  Although there are two Due Process Clauses in the Constitution, these interpreters regard decisions like Roe , Casey , and Lawrence , which recognize substantive rather than pro­cedural due process rights, as lacking a basis in the text of the Constitution, hence as recognizing “unenumerated rights.”

The pejorative “unenumerated rights” is often deployed against Roe and Lawrence in an ad hoc manner, without clarification of whether the critic of unenumerated rights is prepared to abandon all bodies of law that have similar roots or structure.  For example, those who use the objection from unenu­merated rights to attack Roe and Lawrence generally assume that the First Amendment limits state governments; but of course, incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states is also a feature of the Court’s substantive due process doctrine. 30   Other “unenumerated rights” to which most critics of Roe and Lawrence are committed include the applicability of equal protection prin­ciples to the conduct of the federal government. 31   And this view cannot readily distinguish other “unenumerated” rights of unquestioned authority, such as the rights to travel (or not), 32 marry (or not), 33 procreate (or not), 34 and use contra­ceptives (or not). 35   At their Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito learned from the experience of Judge Robert Bork by swearing allegiance to Griswold .

But even if the pejorative term “unenumerated” is deployed selectively and inconsistently, it has frequently been deployed in such a way as to affect popular perceptions of Roe ’s authority.  Accordingly, in light of criticism of the abortion right as “unenumerated,” it is worth asking whether grounding the right in the Equal Protection Clause, as well as the Due Process Clauses, can enhance the political authority of the right.

Adding claims on the Equal Protection Clause to the due process basis for abortion rights can strengthen the case for those rights in constitutional politics as well as constitutional law.  The Equal Protection Clause is a widely ven­erated constitutional text to which Americans across the political spectrum have long laid claim.  And crucially, once the Supreme Court recognizes that people have a right to engage in certain conduct by virtue of equal citizenship, Americans do not count stripping them of this right as an increase in con­sti­tutional legitimacy.  We cannot think of a precedent for this dynamic.  And so: If the Court were to recognize the abortion right as an equality right, a future Court might be less likely to take this right away.

This understanding has increasingly come to shape constitutional law.  We have documented the Supreme Court’s equality-informed understanding of the Due Process Clause in Lawrence and Casey .  We have also identified the grow­ing number of justices who view the Equal Protection Clause as an inde­pendent source of authority for abortion rights.  We view this reading of the substantive due process and equal protection cases as contributing to a synthetic understanding of the constitutional basis of the abortion right—as grounded in both liberty and equality values.  For a variety of reasons this Essay has ex­plored, the synthetic reading leaves abortions right on stronger legal and po­litical footing than a liberty analysis alone.

• Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). ↩
• See infra Part III on the political authority of the Equal Protection Clause. ↩
• For examples of work in the equality tradition that emerged in the years before Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey , 505 U.S. 833 (1992), see Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law § 15-10, at 1353–59 (2d ed. 1990); Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade, 63 N.C. L. Rev. 375 (1985); Sylvia A. Law, Rethinking Sex and the Constitution , 132 U. Pa. L. Rev. 955 (1984); Catharine A. MacKinnon, Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law , 100 Yale L.J. 1281 (1991); Reva Siegel, Reasoning From the Body: A Historical Perspective on Abortion Regulation and Questions of Equal Protection , 44 Stan. L. Rev. 261 (1992) [hereinafter Siegel, Reasoning From the Body ]; and Cass R. Sunstein, Neutrality in Constitutional Law (With Special Reference to Pornography, Abortion, and Surrogacy) , 92 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (1992).  For more recent sex equality work, see, for ex­ample, What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Most Controversial Decision (Jack M. Balkin ed., 2005) (sex equality opinions by Jack Balkin, Reva Siegel, and Robin West); and Reva B. Siegel, Sex Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights: Their Critical Basis and Evolving Constitutional Expression , 56 Emory L.J. 815, 833–34 (2007) [hereinafter Siegel, Sex Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights ] (surveying equality arguments after Casey ). ↩
• See, e.g. , Siegel, Sex Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights , supra note 3, at 817–22. ↩
• See id. at 819. ↩
• See generally Siegel, Reasoning From the Body , supra note 3. ↩
• 539 U.S. 558 (2003). ↩
• Id. at 578. ↩
• Id. at 575. ↩
• Thus the Court wrote that the very “continuance” of Bowers v. Hardwick , 478 U.S. 186 (1986), “as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons.”  Lawrence , 539 U.S. at 575. ↩
• 505 U.S. 833 (1992). ↩
• Id. at 852. ↩
• Id. at 856. ↩
• Id. at 898. ↩
• Id. at 928 (Blackmun, J., concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part). ↩
• Id. ↩
• 550 U.S. 124 (2007). ↩
• Id. at 172 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).  For an argument that “equal citizenship stature” is central to Justice Ginsburg’s constitutional vision, see generally Neil S. Siegel, “Equal Citizenship Stature”: Justice Ginsburg’s Constitutional Vision , 43 New Eng. L. Rev. 799 (2009). ↩
• 518 U.S. 515 (1996). ↩
• Id. at 534. ↩
• See generally Neil S. Siegel, The Virtue of Judicial Statesmanship , 86 Tex. L. Rev. 959, 1014–30 (2008); Reva B. Siegel, Dignity and the Politics of Protection: Abortion Restrictions Under Casey / Carhart, 117 Yale L.J. 1694 (2008). ↩
• 417 U.S. 484 (1974). ↩
• See Neil S. Siegel & Reva B. Siegel, Pregnancy and Sex Role Stereotyping: From Struck to Carhart, 70 Ohio St. L.J. 1095, 1111–13 (2009); Reva B. Siegel, You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Rehnquist’s New Approach to Pregnancy Discrimination in Hibbs, 58 Stan. L. Rev. 1871, 1891–97 (2006). ↩
• Geduldig , 417 U.S. at 496–97 n.20. ↩
• See Brief for Appellees at 38, Geduldig , 417 U.S. 484 (No. 73-640), 1974 WL 185752, at *38 (“The issue for courts is not whether pregnancy is, in the abstract, sui generis, but whether the legal treatment of pregnancy in various contexts is justified or invidious.  The ‘gross, stereotypical dis­tinc­tions between the sexes’ . . . are at the root of many laws and regulations relating to preg­nancy.” (quoting Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 685 (1973))). ↩
• 538 U.S. 721 (2003). ↩
• Id. at 731 (majority opinion of Rehnquist, C.J.) (asserting that differential workplace leave policies for fathers and mothers “were not attributable to any differential physical needs of men and wo­men, but rather to the pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work”); id. at 736 (quoting Congress’s finding that the “prevailing ideology about women’s roles has . . . justified discrimination against women when they are mothers or mothers-to-be” (cita­tion omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted)). ↩
• Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e(k) (2006) (“The terms ‘because of sex’ or ‘on the basis of sex’ include, but are not limited to, because of or on the basis of preg­nancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; and women affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions shall be treated the same for all employment-related purposes . . . .”).  Concerns about sex-role stereotyping played a significant part in Congress’s decision to amend Title VII .  See, e.g. , H.R. Rep. No. 95-948, at 3 (1978) (“[T]he assumption that women will become [pregnant] and leave the labor force leads to the view of women as marginal workers, and is at the root of the discriminatory practices which keep women in low-paying and dead-end jobs.”). ↩
• See, e.g. , McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020, 3050 (2010) (Scalia, J., concurring) (“Despite my misgivings about Substantive Due Process as an original matter, I have acquiesced in the Court’s incorporation of certain guarantees in the Bill of Rights ‘because it is both long es­tab­lished and narrowly limited.’”  This case does not require me to reconsider that view, since straightfor­ward application of settled doctrine suffices to decide it.” (quoting Albright v. Oliver, 510 U.S. 266, 275 (1994))). ↩
• See Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954) (holding that de jure school segregation in Washington, D.C. violates the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment); see also, e.g. , Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 240 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (“These programs not only raise grave constitutional questions, they also undermine the moral basis of the equal protection principle.  Purchased at the price of immeasurable human suffering, the equal protection principle reflects our Nation’s understanding that such classifications ultimately have a destructive impact on the individual and our society.” (emphasis added)). ↩
• See Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969) (right to travel as a fundamental right). ↩
• See Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374 (1978) (right to marry as a fundamental right); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) (same). ↩
• See Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942) (right to procreate as a fundamental right). ↩
• See Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (right to contraception for all individuals as a fundamental right); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (right to contraception for married couples as a fundamental right). ↩
• Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 172 (2007) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). ↩

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About the author.

Neil S. Siegel is Professor of Law and Political Science, Co-Director, Program in Public Law, Duke Law School. Reva B. Siegel is Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale University.

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