This is how women’s rights have progressed

This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) will be held on 8 March with a global programme of events to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women, and to inspire action that will help accelerate gender parity.

The 2020 event is built around the theme #EachforEqual, focusing on the efforts being made worldwide to close the equality gap, to fight bias and to counteract stereotypes.

Since IWD began in 1911, great strides have been made in empowering women and in offering them the same opportunities as men.

Women have become world leaders – with former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike the first to mark that milestone – and taken leading roles in major companies, including Carly Fiorina at computer giant Hewlett-Packard.

And women have won prestigious awards in the sciences and arts. For instance, physicist Marie Curie won her second Nobel peace prize the year IWD was launched, whilie Kathryn Bigelow became the only female to win the Best Director Oscar almost a century later.

Taking a stand

Change has been a long time coming, as this timeline shows:

And yet still much more needs to be done, as this year’s edition of the World Economic Forum Global Global Gender Gap Report highlights.

The headline statistic illustrates the uphill struggle women face: despite improvements made since the survey’s inception 14 years ago, it will still take almost a century before women can expect to achieve equality with men.

That means almost no woman alive today will experience gender parity.

Political power

The figure is an average taken from four measurements of attainment – Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.

In educational attainment, for instance, parity will be reached within 12 years if rates of improvement seen since 2014 continue. At the other end of the scale, equality in political representation will take 257 years.

“Overall, the quest towards gender parity has improved, ducking back under a century and registering a marked improvement on the 108 years in the 2018 index,” says the report.

“Greater political representation for women has contributed to this, but overall the political arena remains the worst-performing dimension.”

Widespread bias

Gender bias against women is still widespread - on both sides of the gender divide.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, a landmark event that established guidelines for creating equal societies, the United Nations has published a Tackling Social Norms report.

It found 91% of men and 86% of women show at least one clear bias against gender equality in areas such as politics, economic, education, intimate partner violence and women’s reproductive rights.

About 50% of men and women interviewed across 75 countries say they think men make better political leaders than women, while more than 40% felt that men made better business executives.

And perhaps more concerning, the gender bias against women has actually increased in the last decade.

As the Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, says: "We don't have an equal world at the moment and we are radically impatient for that change to come."