Tools to shatter the glass ceiling

HOW big and thick is the glass ceiling? New analysis suggests that it covers all aspects of women’s lives — including the household — and that it is constructed, not of glass, but of pervasive bias and prejudice against women held by both men and women worldwide.

These were the findings in the new Gender Social Norms Index released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This index measures how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in areas like politics, work and education, and contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 per cent of the world’s population.

This new analysis reveals that, despite decades of progress closing the equality gap between men and women, close to 90 per cent of men and women hold some sort of bias against women, providing new clues to the invisible barriers women face in achieving equality, and a potential path forward to shattering the glass ceiling.

According to the index, about half of the world’s men and women feel that men make better political leaders, and over 40 per cent feel that men make better business executives and that men have more right to a job when jobs are scarce. Twenty-eight per cent think it is justified for a man to beat his wife.

“We have come a long way in recent decades to ensure that women have the same access to life’s basic needs as men. We have reached parity in primary school enrolment and reduced maternal mortality by 45 per cent since the year 1990. But gender gaps are still all too obvious in other areas, particularly those that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality. Today the fight about gender equality is a story of bias and prejudices,” said Pedro Conceição, head of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office.

Next week: The ‘Power Gap’ — new analysis sheds light on why enormous ‘power gaps’ still exist between men and women in our economies, our political systems, and our corporations despite real progress closing gender inequalities.