Gender Inequalities and Economic Growth: A Longitudinal Evaluation

Controversy exists over whether to target public- and private-sector programs to female-headed households in developing countries in the attempt to combat poverty and social disadvantage. The issues related to the definition and measurement of female headship and the importance of the concept for development policy are discussed. A systematic review is then presented of the empirical evidence on the relation between female headship and poverty. If female-headed households tend to be poorer on average than other households headship should seriously be considered as a potentially useful criterion for targeting antipoverty interventions especially in developing countries where means testing is not feasible. The authors examine the potential costs and benefits of targeting female headship and review the experience of Chile one of the few countries which has targeted female headship through government intervention and the only one which has evaluation data available. The analysis of the project experience is used along with a review of the empirical evidence to answer the question of the desirability and efficiency of targeting female headship in order to reduce poverty in developing countries.

IntroductionGendered practices of working life create gender inequalities through horizontal and vertical gender segregation in work, which may lead to inequalities in health between women and men. Gender equality could therefore be a key element of health equity in working life. Our aim was to analyze what gender (in)equality means for the employees at a woman-dominated workplace and discuss possible implications for health experiences.MethodsAll caregiving staff at two workplaces in elder care within a municipality in the north of Sweden were invited to participate in the study. Forty-five employees participated, 38 women and 7 men. Seven focus group discussions were performed and led by a moderator. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the focus groups.ResultsWe identified two themes. "Advocating gender equality in principle" showed how gender (in)equality was seen as a structural issue not connected to the individual health experiences. "Justifying inequality with individualism" showed how the caregivers focused on personalities and interests as a justification of gender inequalities in work division. The justification of gender inequality resulted in a gendered work division which may be related to health inequalities between women and men. Gender inequalities in work division were primarily understood in terms of personality and interests and not in terms of gender.ConclusionThe health experience of the participants was affected by gender (in)equality in terms of a gendered work division. However, the participants did not see the gendered work division as a gender equality issue. Gender perspectives are needed to improve the health of the employees at the workplaces through shifting from individual to structural solutions. A healthy-setting approach considering gender relations is needed to achieve gender equality and fairness in health status between women and men.

Measuring Gender Equality in Education: Lessons from Trends in 43 Countries

Although it seems almost a stylized fact that females are less likely than males to start new ventures, closing this gender gap is essential to foster sustainable economic growth. In this study, we analyze whether gender inequality, as measured at the country level by the World Economic Forum since 2006, is associated with the gender gap in entrepreneurship. By analyzing country-level information about gender inequality (97 countries) in combination with individual-level data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (1,905,665 individuals) from the years 2006 to 2017, we find that in more gender equal countries involvement in total early-stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA) is higher. Gender inequality moderates the effect of gender on TEA, by almost closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship in the most gender equal countries. We show that gender inequalities in economic participation and opportunity as well as in political empowerment are the main drivers of this interaction effect. We find similar patterns when distinguishing between opportunity-driven and necessity-driven TEA. With opportunity-driven entrepreneurship as a potential vehicle for the economic empowerment of females, our study highlights the role of policies stimulating gender equality.

Over the past fifteen years, a new dimension to the analysis of science has emerged. Feminist theory, combined with the insights of recent developments in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, has raised a number of new and important questions about the content, practice, and traditional goals of science. Feminists have pointed to a bias in the choice and definition of problems with which scientists have concerned themselves, and in the actual design and interpretation of experiments, and have argued that modern science evolved out of a conceptual structuring of the world that incorporated particular and historically specific ideologies of gender. The seventeen outstanding articles in this volume reflect the diversity and strengths of feminist contributions to current thinking about science.

Similar to many creative (and other) industries, the film and television industries have for long been permeated by male norms, and by the male worker as the norm. In this context, women workers have always been considered "oddities" – unless they have acted in front of the camera. To a large extent, women have been (and still are) image (Fischer, 1976; Mulvey, 1975). Women's work behind the camera have been counteracted, not least through efforts to exclude them from positions characterized as "creative" or "above-the-line" such as director, producer, and script writer. Further, women have been met with pervading difficulties in allocating finances for their projects and with circumscribed possibilities to have their work screened in the cinema. And although (a few) women are key through their function as "image," films with a woman protagonist are usually provided with a lesser budget than films with a male lead, and women actors get distinctly less paid than their male counterparts (SFI, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2017/08/22/full-list-the-worlds-highest-paid-actors-and-actresses-2017/?sh=2e1c961f3751). Let us give an example of the former: in the Swedish film industry, recently hailed worldwide of being one of the most gender equal screening industries, feature films made between 2013 and 2016 differed in terms of budget depending on the whether the protagonist in a film was male or female. Films with a male lead had on average a 33% higher budget than films with a woman lead. In that same period, women feature film directors had on average a budget ranging between 66% and 86% of the budget of films with a man as director (SFI, 2018). The report published in 2018, by the Swedish Film Institute, concluded that: "[films with women in] key functions generally have overall lower budgets than men" (SFI, 2018, p. 17). Following the international impact that the #Metoo-movement has had and still has, and the recent demands for a 50/50 dispersion between men and women on above-the-line positions in the film industry, gender issues have advanced to the forefront in discussions dealing with the working situation in the film and screen industries. These discussions have appeared in various national contexts in print and social media, as well as in academic work (see, e.g., Jansson et al., 2020; Liddy, 2020; Marghitu, 2018; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020; O'Brien, 2019). It has become obvious that gender inequality pervades all screen industries, large and small, and that women screen workers in different national screen contexts share similar experiences. As film and television production is becoming more and more globalized, with single productions often being the outcome a variety of regional and national industries, finances and competences, working and gendered experiences of being in the industry are also becoming increasingly globalized. Still, there are regional and local differences in how women screen workers experience their work and career situation and these need to be addressed. There are also various aspects of screen work that remain to be tended to academically. Hence, this special section offers a sample of national and local studies that all investigate how gender and equality work is done in four different contexts. It is our hope that this small sample may inspire not only more studies of national contexts, but also inspire to future cross-national studies. Before discussing how various academic fields have engaged with the screening industries in terms of work experience and representation, we wish to point out that film and television, as two available media formats reaching large and heterogeneous audiences, constitute two of the most central expressions of our time, and that both contribute to reflect and mold our understanding of society, of others – and of ourselves (de Lauretis, 1987; Dyer, 1993). Questions about who is allowed to make film and TV and what messages and images are presented and conveyed are thus politically important and imperative. The long-standing male dominance in the industry, together with the realization that images do matter, has sparked an interest in studying gender in the screen industries. The gender conditions in the film industry have attracted scholarly attention across the variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, and this special section is a vivid example of this cross-disciplinary scholarship. Three specific, but interrelated fields stand out when it comes to the study of gendered work and inequalities in these industries: production studies, management and life work studies, and studies of women's presence and conditions in screen work. In management studies and work life research, the early 2000s saw an increased interest in focusing and exploring the working conditions in the screening industries, alongside the growing interest for working experiences in what often referred to as the creative industries (see, e.g., Blair, 2001; Delmestri et al., 2005; Ebbers & Wijnberg, 2009; French, 2020; Jones & Pringle, 2015; Meziani & Cabantous, 2020; Soila-Wadman, 2003; Sörensen & Villadsen, 2014). This strand has also included a certain focus on how film can be used as a tool for instruction on how to exert leadership (see, e.g., Bell & Sinclair, 2016). Parallel to this development is the emergence of production studies, emanating from film and television studies. This field explores film and media as cultural practices of media production, and it does so from a variety of perspectives and with various methods. Of particular pertinence here is the sub-field of feminist production studies. This field engages in studying how "routines and rituals […], the economic and political forces […] shape roles, technologies, and the distribution of resources according to cultural and demographic differences" (Mayer et al., 2009, p. 4) in order to understand how "power operates locally through media production to reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities at the level of daily interaction" (Mayer, 2009, p. 15). One of the field's most important contributions here is the critique of the "auteurist" view that films are the "voice" of one single artist, most often the director. Instead, they argue that films are the result of collective work. Departing from this insight, production studies scholars have noted the importance of studying the work that is carried out in the margins, to question the differentiation between "creative" and "craft" professions in film making, and to pay attention to the work done "below-the-line" by workers in the film industry who are seldom credited, but without whose work films would not be produced (see, e.g., Banks, 2009, 2018; Banks et al., 2016; Mayer, 2009, 2011; Mayer et al., 2009). Alongside these two areas of research, there is a third, and more recent, strand that is dedicated to studying women's presence, analyzing policy measures targeting gender (in)equality along with studying impediments to gender equality in the film industry and women's conditions in a male dominated screening industry. This strand of research comes out of feminist media studies as a rather broad field, encompassing both the humanities and the social sciences. While research in both management studies and productions studies constitute important foundations for any research conducted on gender and screen work, for this special section, it is this third strand that is of most relevance, taken that it embraces and explores both local and the global aspects of women's conditions in the male dominated screening industries. Let us therefore shortly present this strand a bit more – and the issues it has raised – in order to give a contextualization of this special section and its four articles. Studies of women's presence in the film industry have mapped the number of women behind the camera, sometimes also including an intersectional analysis and identified gendered budget-gaps and other impediments to gender equality (Cobb, 2020; Lauzen, 2019; Liddy, 2020; Smith et al., 2013). Much of this research is conducted in the United States, discussing the conditions in a film industry that is exclusively driven by private, and most often commercial, stakeholders. In other commercially focused film centers such as Bollywood in India and Nollywood in Nigeria, women behind the screen are reported to be few and the representation of women on screen stereotypical (Mukherjee, 2018; Prakash, 2020; Ukata, 2020). In other contexts, such as Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where there is public support for film production, gender equality is often proclaimed to be a goal. For instance, the Council of Europe (2017) declared its dedication to gender equality in film production in the so-called Sarajevo-declaration, and according to a mapping carried out by the European Audiovisual Observatory in 2019, 15 EU countries have introduced gender equality measures (EAO, 2019, p. 16). In a recent anthology collecting evidence from a number of countries, media scholar Susan Liddy concludes that while demands for gender equality has been voiced by women in all contexts, public funding institutions range from those being "gender blind… to those who theoretically commit to equality but prevaricate on the best measures to implement change to others who have introduced formal gender policies and intervention strategies" (Liddy, 2020, p. 2). Scholars have pointed to several problems with gender equality policies and reforms in the film sector: they are often vague and without a plan for implementation (Thorsen, 2020), they only reach those who are involved in projects actually funded by public means (Cobb & Williams, 2020), and they lack intersectional intention and reach (Cobb & Williams, 2020; Thorsen, 2020). Further, when reforms are implemented, problems arise because making films include a range of different stakeholders and parties, which are out of reach of government policies (Jansson, 2016), and because the film industry is entrenched with institutionalized norms and values that is difficult to change and which tend to reduce the effects of policies (Jansson, 2017; Jansson & Wallenberg, 2020). Scholars investigating women's conditions in the film industry have for a long time indicated that the way the industry is organized both formally and informally benefits white men. The sexual division of labor in the organization is manifested in women being found on positions such as script supervisors, costume designers, and make-up artists, as well as in various below-the-line positions. Many below-the-line professions are dominated by men, and the female dominated positions such as the ones mentioned above, tend to have lower status (Banks, 2009). Scholars have also noted differences in status among above-the-line professions. For instance, while male directors and scriptwriters are considered to be able to "carry" a movie, women directors and scriptwriters are not considered to do so (Bielby & Bielby, 1996, Eikhof and Cole in this issue). The trope of the male genius has been discussed as a hindrance to gender equality in several studies (see, e.g., Lantz, 2007; Marghitu, 2018; Regev, 2016; Schatz, 1988; and by Jansson et al. in this special section). Studies have also looked into how other features of the way the film industry is organized affects gender and concluded that the outcome of networking differs substantially to the favor of men (Grugulis & Stoyanova, 2012). Moreover, mothering duties limits women's possibilities in an industry where long days and extremely intense periods of work away from home are considered to be the normal procedure (Liddy, 2017; Liddy & O'Brien, 2021; O'Brien, 2015, 2019; Wing-Fai et al., 2015; Wreyford, 2013). Considering all these past (and recent) studies, there is no doubt that the screening industries – as production sites and as workplaces – are of definite interest to scholars within different disciplines. This special section aims at addressing some of the issues that recent scholarship has touched upon and tried to tackle, and it does so from four different national and cultural contexts. At the center of all four articles included in the section is the analysis of women's conditions in the screening industries, including their experiences of working and trying to get by – and of how these industries continue to foster the notion of women film workers as "oddities" in an industry that continues to uphold the idea of the genius as male. Let us now turn to the four articles included in this special section. In our first article, "The price of motherhood in the Irish film and television industries," media scholars Susan Liddy and Anne O'Brien discuss the continuous problems that surround motherhood and screen work, finding in their material evidence that there is a systemic bias against mothers, not only as women, but also as women and mothers, and that mothers have internalized the marginalization that comes from their maternal status. They have also found that many mothers adapted ways that would help them to sustain their working lives, but they were rarely supported in those adaptations by the screen production industry. In "'Almost a European, but not quite': Experiences of Female Employees in the Lithuanian Film Industry from the Postcolonial Point of View," authors Lina Kaminskaite and Jelena Salaj discuss how the women filmmakers experience their conditions in a film industry that is still marked by the transformation of Lithuania from being part of the Soviet union to becoming a country which is a member of the EU. They argue that the Lithuanian film industry is characterized by being in a postcolonial state. While the opening up of Lithuania has meant new possibilities for women film workers, it has also presented difficulties and the negotiation of new identities and new mode of film production. Doris Ruth Eikhof and Amanda Cole focus on how women are considered a risk in film production and how this leads to precarious conditions for women in the industry. In their article named, "On the basis of risk: Screen directors and gender inequality," they use the intersectional risk theory to understand how gender inequality is related to risk management practices in the screen industry. Studying two specific gender equality initiatives in the Canadian film industry, they show how risk management is gendered, and they argue that risk plays an important part in decision making in the industry. By understanding how risk is gendered, they argue, it is possible to change the processes that decides how risk is understood. The last article included in this special section departs from the much-debated aspect of film production, namely the final saying over a film's final format. In "The Final Cut," authors Maria Jansson, Frantzeska Papadopoulou, Ingrid Stigsdotter, and Louise Wallenberg discuss how the relationship between film director and producer serve to reproduce gendered relations that position the male creator and producer as norm – even in contexts where both director and producer are women. Departing from a series of interviews made with mostly women working in these two professions, the authors show how these two above-the-line professions are still governed by the malestream and that they tend to be constructed in relation to masculinity. Clearly, even in a country like Sweden, often hailed for its equality work, the gender equality measures that are undertaken are not sufficient to come to grips with gender inequalities and the male norm. Taken together the four articles shed light on different aspects of the film industry. The evidence provided from the different countries indicate that there are many similarities in the challenges that women in the film industry face. However, there are also differences depending on context. The article about Lithuania shows the importance of situating the film industry in a historical and political context. O'Brian and Liddy show in their article, the importance of understanding the specific context of how child care and the welfare state play out in order to capture women's conditions in film and television work. Eikhof and Cole's article demonstrates the necessity of applying an intersectional approach in order to also see differences in conditions between women, even if they work in the same industry and the same country. The article on Sweden, finally, looks deeper into how specific gender equality policies targeting the film industry plays out, and what problems remain, after having been implemented for almost 20 years. We believe that this special section is one step toward a deeper understanding of how gender shapes the working conditions in the film industry, and hope that it will inspire further research that takes a wider, more inclusive and possibly also more comparative grip on women screen worker's experiences and work conditions. This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under Grant no. P17-0079:1. No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors. The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and/or its supplementary materials.

Girl child of today is woman of tomorrow; however, gender inequity is predominant particularly in developing countries. She receives less formal education than boy has. Gender inequities and inequalities and inequalities predispose girls even from conception, to discrimination in terms of being born, allocation of family resources, and access to health care and education. Advancing gender equality and equity is a cornerstone to ensure a better life for girls. Empowering girls will therefore ensure that policies and programs at all community levels incorporate a gender perspective and address girl’s lives and their needs. The aim of this study is to identify gender equity adopted by families in relation to health seeking behaviors, education and socialization in Mansoura City. The study was carried out at homes of 240 mothers who are selected randomly from 12 villages. A structured interview sheet was developed to collect the needed information. The study results revealed that 3.1% of studied children leave school in primary level and most of them were girls. Half of girls [50%] compared to 28.6% of boys miss school for family assistance. It was evident that gender gap was still present in education, nutrition, and mainly in the perception of mothers toward son preference and to domination of brother. It is obvious that mother’s education and socio-economic status contribute positively to gender equity, while son preference was more common among large families. The main recommendations were creating community awareness and cooperation about matters related to gender equity, establish periodic national programs to increase attention toward gender equity, encourage and support women and girls for self-expression and fulfillment, empowering women and raising their status through better educational opportunities, as well promoting women’s understanding of their needs and assertion of their rights.

The history of women's engagement with the academy has been characterised by exclusion and inequality. Seven decades ago, Virginia Woolf1 asked: Do we want to join the procession or don't we? On wh...

ABSTRACTAccording to recent research, the impact of awareness‐raising interventions about gender (in)equality depends on how messages are framed. Extending previous work, we conducted an experimental study (N = 1093; 50% women) to examine whether the combination of two frames about gender (in)equality (emphasizing the achievement of gender equality and the persistence of gender inequality) had more positive effects on attitudes toward women and gender equality of women and men than each framing individually. Additionally, we considered the mediating role of identity threat and cognitive unfreezing, and the moderating role of participants’ neosexism and feminist identification. The results showed that the combined frame, compared to the gender inequality persistence‐frame, reduced identity threat and improved attitudes toward women and gender equality solely among women. We also found that the combined framing, compared to the equality framing, increased cognitive unfreezing and improved women's and non‐sexist men's attitudes toward women and gender equality. However, for non‐sexist women, this framing was less beneficial than the inequality framing. In conclusion, the present study highlights the need to examine both the possible mechanisms involved and the gender ideology of individuals whenever interventions targeting gender equality are designed.

We need to make sure telecommuting does not exacerbate gender disparity

Climate change and gender equality in developing states

The biggest barrier to an egalitarian Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) appears to be deeply ingrained structural obstacles and gender imbalances. The significant prevalence of gender inequities, which have both structural and economic ramifications, must be addressed if SSA is committed to achieving the Africa 2063 Agenda (the Africa we want) and Sustainable Development Agenda 2030: gender equity and equality, and economic development. Using partial least squares simultaneous equation modeling (PLS‐SEM), this study examines the effects of gender inequality and occupational segregation on economic growth in Sub‐Saharan Africa. The explanatory power of the structural path model indicated that 17.3% of the variations in latent endogenous variable economic growth in SSA are explained by gender inequality and occupational segregation. This is evidence that gender inequality and occupational segregation account for a significant portion of economic growth in the SSA region. The results of a bootstrapping simulation indicate that, in SSA nations, the direct impact of gender inequality on economic growth is insignificant (β = 0.068, p > 0.05) while occupational segregation, macroeconomic policies, and globalization have a significant impact. However, the indirect effects of both gender inequality (β = −0.048, p < 0.05) and occupational segregation (β = −0.011, p < 0.05) on economic growth via the coordinating power of macroeconomic policy and globalization are significant. This demonstrated that macroeconomic policies are not gender‐neutral. It is therefore recommended that the most significant progress toward achieving an egalitarian SSA be made through an adequate fiscal policy interplay that considers the socioeconomic level of SSA people. Advocate for trade liberalization policies and globalization to benefit from the spillover effects of greater demand for female labor, which promotes gender equality and economic expansion. Even though the gender gap in education and health is closing, SSA countries should fully implement the International Labour Organization (ILO) treaties on gender equality. This will help to lessen social consumption spending and encourage investment spending, which generates returns to develop the economy in the realization of the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 and the Africa 2063 Agenda (the Africa we want).

The relationship between women, the economy, and state law in Muslim countries has generated intense debate about whether such laws have promoted or inversely impeded women's rights and gender equality. This study aims to assess women's economic rights, especially in entrepreneurship, in Indonesia from the state and Islamic legal perspectives. It is qualitative research with the juridical and sociological legal approach by analyzing the dimensions of report on entrepreneurship in Women, Business, and the Law 2023 achieved by Indonesia, Law state-related, and Islamic Law. It finds that Indonesia has promoted women's economic rights, including entrepreneurship, in the state law, despite some room for improvement. Women have the same rights to business licenses, enter into contracts or agreements, and open bank accounts, despite a lack of affirmative actions for access to credits for women entrepreneurs. As the biggest Muslim country in the world, Islamic law has influenced such state law. Islam has granted women the right to be self-employed, despite some cultural barriers to achieving gender equality. The government is expected to promote women's economic rights, including the ones on entrepreneurship, and needs to overturn the prevailing gender norms that assign women multiple burdens.

Even though breastfeeding is typically considered the preferred feeding method for infants worldwide, in Belgium, breastfeeding rates remain low across native and migrant groups while the underlying determinants are unclear. Furthermore, research examining contextual effects, especially regarding gender (in)equality and ideology, has not been conducted. We hypothesized that greater gender equality scores in the country of origin will result in higher breastfeeding chances. Because gender equality does not operate only at the contextual level but can be mediated through individual level resources, we hypothesized the following for maternal education: higher maternal education will be an important positive predictor for exclusive breastfeeding chances in Belgium, but its effects will differ over subsequent origin countries. Based on IKAROS data (GeÏntegreerd Kind Activiteiten en Regio Ondersteunings Systeem), we perform multilevel analyses on 27 936 newborns. Feeding method is indicated by exclusive breastfeeding 3 months after childbirth. We measure gender (in)equality using Global Gender Gap scores from the mother's origin country. Maternal education is a metric variable based on International Standard Classification of Education indicators. Results show that 3.6% of the variation in breastfeeding can be explained by differences between the migrant mother's country of origin. However, the effect of gender (in)equality appears to be non-significant. After adding maternal education, the effect for origin countries scoring low on gender equality turns significant. Maternal education on its own shows strong positive association with exclusive breastfeeding and, furthermore, has different effects for different origin countries. Possible explanations are discussed in-depth setting direction for further research regarding the different pathways gender (in)equality and maternal education affect breastfeeding. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

It is an obvious fact that the human capital can only be enlarged with a sustainable education system. In this context, education is a unique area in which it promotes the equality of employment opportunities and amplify the economic growth. In addition, it supports the women’s empowerment itself. Moreover, it serves an interventionist role for both educators (i.e. teachers, school managers) and the educated ones (i.e. students). In considering the national education system, women have the equal opportunities to take the same education rights as the men. Also, the orientation and training of the teachers and the active involvement of educational institutions are the basic proofs of the gender equality. Even some improvements are observed in gaining the gender equality in education, some striking facts about the gender inequality can come in sight with the statistical facts. While the gender inequality in education is not an essential problem for the developed countries, developing countries or underdeveloped countries may suffer from this kind of inequality. According to Schultz (2002), the largest component of the investment in human capital is just the enrollment in schools, and generally female enrollment rates are used in order to show the gender inequality. Besides, gender distributions of the teachers are also good indicators. From this point, in the first part of the study, we try to analyze the gender (in)equality in education by making some comparisons among the country groups and in the second part, we aim to focus on the education system in Turkey.