UN Gender Research Articles

Men's Views on Gender Equality: Attitudes and Behaviors at Male-Friendly Clinics in Malawi

Abstract Background Malawi ranks 173 out of 188 on the UN's Gender Inequality Index (GII) and Malawi has the eighth highest child marriage rate in the world. While previous research has mostly focused on understanding gender roles and norms from women's viewpoints, there has been limited exploration of men's attitudes and behaviors towards gender equality. This study seeks to address this gap by examining the social determinants that shape gender-equitable attitudes and investigating the relationship between behaviors and attitudes in Southern Malawi. Methods Between August 2022 and November 2022, we conducted an observational study in four healthcare facilities located in Balaka, Phalula, Namandanje, and Kapire. The study focused on men who participated in a health education program specifically designed for them, known as male-friendly clinics. We interviewed these men using a structured questionnaire based on the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), which includes the Gender-Equitable Men (GEM) scale. To identify the factors influencing gender-equitable attitudes and explore the associated behaviors, we employed both univariate and multivariable analyses. Results We included a total of 422 men in this study, with a median age of 46 years (IQR= 34, 55). Men reported a median score of 0.53 on the Gender Equality Attitudes (GEM) scale, where 1 represents the higher GEM scores and indicates more equitable attitudes. Higher gender-equitable attitudes were associated with higher education, urban areas and with various behaviours, such as joint decision-making in couples in women's (0.55 vs 0.49; p= 0.008) and children's health (0.54 vs 0.48; p=0.012), and in spending on food and clothing (0.56 vs 0.49; p<0.001). Conclusions This study showed that education and location are the two leading social determinants that affect attitudes toward gender in Southern Malawi. This study confirmed that more gender-equitable attitudes reflect less power imbalance in couples. Key messages • Higer education grade and urban areas affect attitudes toward gender equality in Southern Malawi. • Gender-equitable attitudes reflect equal distritution of power in couples.

A research on the role of women in economic development in the BRICS countries

Women account for almost half of the world population, however, their contribution to the economic development is rather limited due to significant gender imparity manifested in different aspects: from participation in decision-making and employment to incomes and property. The paper aims to explore and assess the potential of women empowerment to the benefits of economic growth in the BRICS countries. Methodologically, the paper relies on the theory of gender order and the interdisciplinary approach to the research of gender inequality. The study applies methods of systematisation, content analysis, and comparison of time series. By analysing a range of international organisations’ reports, the paper provides insight in the state of affairs with gender inequality in the BRICS countries looking at its key characteristics in the economic, educational, social, and political spheres. Using the World Bank data for 2000–2021, the paper examines women’s empowerment according to the dimensions accounted for in the UN Gender Inequality Index: empowerment, health, and labour market. The findings indicate that the BRICS countries are far behind in terms of delivering real justice to women’s empowerment. Among the five countries China and Russia seem to be putting the strongest efforts to reduce gender gap, Brazil demonstrates good dynamics, but has a long way to go, while South Africa and India confront many deep-rooted problems that strongly thwart their progress. The theoretical and practical significance of the study lies in the consolidation of the data on the problem of gender imparity as well as their interpretation in the context of supporting gender equal societies in the BRICS countries to promote the global spatial economic development.

Gender Equality and the Global Gender Gap in Life Expectancy: An Exploratory Analysis of 152 Countries.

When looking at life expectancy (LE) by sex, women live longer than men in all countries. Biological factors alone do not explain gender differences in LE, and examining structural differences may help illuminate other explanatory factors. The aim of this research is to analyse the influence of gender inequality on the gender gap in LE globally. We have carried out a regression analysis between the gender gap in relativised LE and the UN Gender Inequality Index (GII), with a sensitivity analysis conducted for its three dimensions, stratified by the six World Health Organization (WHO) regions. We adjusted the model by taking into consideration gross national income (GNI), democratic status and rural population. The results indicated a positive association for the European region (ß=0.184) and the Americas (ß=0.136) in our adjusted model. Conversely, for the African region, the relations between gender equality and the LE gender gap were found to be negative (ß=-0.125). The findings suggest that in the WHO European region and the Americas, greater gender equality leads to a narrowing of the gender LE gap, while it has a contrary relationship in Africa. We suggest that this could be because only higher scores in the GII between men and women show health benefits.

Female Leadership and Firm Performance

This study explores whether companies´ experience benefits when the firm's CEO and owner are both women. It employs data from the 2009-2014 World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) to measure firms' performance through growth in sales and productivity. Potential endogeneity was corrected by using the UN Gender Development Index and the average fertility rate as they comply with the exclusion restrictions. The paper uses the Control Function method with a Probit first stage estimation and an OLS main equation. The findings suggest that a female owner strengthens the female CEO's business skills and leads to better firm performance than when the CEO is a woman and the owner is a man.

What's in an Index: Opening Pandora's Box on Equality and Diversity Indices

Research utilizing equality and diversity benchmarks and indices -- such the UN Gender Inequality Index or SHRM Global Diversity Readiness Index -- has been scarce, although it has the potential to...

Contested Practices, Human Rights, and Colonial Bodies in Pain: The UN's Gender Politics in Africa, 1940s–1960s

Gender & HistoryVolume 30, Issue 1 p. 196-213 Article Contested Practices, Human Rights, and Colonial Bodies in Pain: The UN's Gender Politics in Africa, 1940s–1960s Giusi Russo, Giusi Russo orcid.org/0000-0003-2844-4853 Search for more papers by this author Giusi Russo, Giusi Russo orcid.org/0000-0003-2844-4853 Search for more papers by this author First published: 13 March 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12337Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume30, Issue1March 2018Pages 196-213 RelatedInformation

United Nations Gender Network: United Nations Policy Proposal on Gender Equality and Parity

The UN Gender Network (UNGN) is rooted in both strengthening the UN’s leadership of gender equality and the empowerment of women working within the UN Secretariat, Funds, Programmes and Agencies. The UNGN believes that to enhance the UN’s leadership legitimacy in all areas but particularly regarding gender equality; to ensure the UN attracts the best talent from around the globe and to guarantee the UN fully represents ‘we the peoples’ significant change regarding gender equality amongst UN staff is required. This policy paper places the women who work at the UN at its core. This policy looks at the history of women working at the Organisation, past attempts to strengthen their roles and looking to the future, suggests changes at the both the policy and practice levels to ensure that women working at the UN will be better served. This policy proposal aims to cause a significant shift in not just the numbers of women working at all levels at the UN but also their experiences within the workplace. The policy’s goal is to make the UN a better place for all staff to work and in doing so ensuring they can lead states in making their own workplaces into spaces where gender equality is without question a good.

A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Relationship between Egalitarian Gender Role Attitudes and Life Satisfaction

In the present study, we investigated the relationship between egalitarian gender role endorsement, gender role satisfaction, and satisfaction with life among women in two cultural contexts, Kurdistan in Iraq and Norway, which differ widely in their acceptance of gender inequality according to the World Values Survey and the UN Gender Inequality Index. We predicted the relationship between egalitarian gender role endorsement (measured by the ENRICH- Equalitarian Roles Scale) and gender role satisfaction would vary across these two cultural contexts, but that gender role satisfaction would predict satisfaction with life in both cultures. Responses from 899 female university students (252 Kurdish and 246 Norwegian student teachers; 211 Kurdish and 190 Norwegian student nurses) confirmed our hypotheses. Egalitarian gender attitudes more strongly predicted gender role satisfaction in Norway than in Kurdistan (student teachers: r = .17 vs .07; nursing students: r = .37 vs. .18), but gender role satisfaction predicted life satisfaction in both cultures (r = .40 and .47; r = .49 and .47, respectively). Analyses confirmed that the mediating role of gender satisfaction was moderated by country. Our results shed light on the important role of gender satisfaction in explaining cultural differences in the relationship between egalitarian gender role attitudes and life satisfaction.

United Nations Gender Network: First Workshop Report

UN Gender Network: First Workshop Report Final Report of Workshop held at Reading University.

Legal Feminism and the UN's Gender Mainstreaming Policy: Still Searching for the Blind Spot?

This article primarily assesses feminism’s achievements and challenges, particularly within the framework of the UN gender mainstreaming policy. The first part of the article explored different feminist inquiries into general law to question whether such inquiries have been successfully or properly reflected in the UN gender mainstream process. The second part focused on the progress made by the UN Security Council through its series of resolutions on Women, Peace and Security to examine the ways in which international institutions and international legal categories tend to exclude women and the issues of most concern to women. This analysis, owing much to the extensive literatures on female analyses on international law in the last two decades, led to the conclusion that despite the significant progress that has been made by feminist international lawyers, there remain many ongoing challenges before international law may fully embrace and reflect ‘true’ feminist values.

Willingness to Compete in a Gender Equal Society

A number of experimental studies have found that females are more competitively inclined than males, and it has been argued that this difference potentially can explain a wide range of real world economic phenomena, including observed gender differences in labor markets (Balafoutas and Sutter, 2012; Flory et al., 2010; Gneezy et al., 2003; Gneezy and Rustichini, 2004; Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007, 2011; Sutter and R¨utzler, 2010). Recent evidence suggests that the gender difference in willingness to compete largely reflects cultural norms, which has been seen as providing justification for gender equalizing public policies aiming at eliminating this asymmetry between males and females (Gneezy et al., 2009).The Scandinavian countries have for a long time pursued such policies, and are today considered among the most gender equal societies in the world; in fact, Norway ranks highest on the UN gender equality index comprising measures of educational attainment, labor market participation and health.1 Still, in a large lab experiment conducted with adolescents in Norway, we find a substantial gender difference in the willingness to compete, in line with what has been observed in Sweden (C´ardenas et al., 2012). We argue that these observations from Scandinavia provide a challenge to the gender policy debate, namely how to view preference differences in free and gender equal societies. Economists have traditionally assigned great importance to respecting individual preferences, as exemplified by the recent literature on libertarian paternalism (Sunstein and Thaler, 2008), but have been more willing to consider policies that nudge people in a particular direction if this is to overcome a particular behavioral bias, for example when individuals hold incorrect beliefs about their own abilities.

Strategies of Feminist Bureaucrats: United Nations Experiences

SummaryThis paper explores the challenges and opportunities for feminists working as women's rights and gender equality specialists in the United Nations as analysed from a practitioner perspective. Part 1 by Joanne Sandler analyses the experience of feminists struggling with the institutional sexism of the UN bureaucratic machine and shows how this played out in the difficult but ultimately successful negotiations around the creation of UN Women. In Part 2, Aruna Rao describes how cross‐agency UN Gender Theme Groups worked together through a process of reflexive inquiry to strengthen the gender equality programming of three UN Country Teams, respectively in Morocco, Albania and Nepal.

Turning the Gendered Politics of the Security State Inside Out?

This article analyzes sexual harassment politics in the global south as a crucial laboratory for testing and reformulating the mix of emancipatory and repressive governance practices that constitute contemporary gender-sensitive ‘human security’ regimes. In Egypt, between 2003 and 2010, internationalist feminist campaigns advocated anti-harassment projects that demonized working-class youth masculinities as well as ‘disreputable’ public femininities in an attempt to intensify the policing of the city and discipline public sociability. Through a politics of respectability and ‘strange bedfellow’ processes of NGO-ization, this state-allied, pro-enforcement project demobilized class-based movements for democratic change. By contrast, inventive Egyptian organizations adapted UN gender doctrines and legal mechanisms to their own purposes, mobilizing mass campaigns that critiqued frameworks of police protection and social respectability. They cultivated forms of assertive female agency that came to occupy center-stage during the recent Egyptian Revolution of January and February of 2011. By contrasting these forms of global/local feminist organizing, this article reveals the queering power of new metaphors of masculinity, class struggle and global female insecurity. The conclusion generates a critical theory of security-state practice and illuminates alternative global-south feminisms that contest rather than facilitate securitized and militarized appropriations of internationalist gender and security interventions.

Challenging the margin: Gender equality and the UN reform process

In 2006 the Secretary General's High-Level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence called for a dynamic new gender entity led by an Under-Secretary General. The follow-up to this recommendation is still ongoing, leaving the UN gender machinery in its current fragmented and weakened state. This enduring dilemma has its origins in bureaucratic incoherence, lack of senior management support for UN gender equality efforts, the failure of member states to support the Beijing Platform for Action, the impact of conservative regimes, and recent US dominance over the UN reform process. Is a new women's agency, with increased authority, new staffing and significantly increased resources possible, or should transnational feminists seek to establish an autonomous women's agency outside the UN system to provide better leadership for gender equality efforts world-wide?

Turning Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in Postapartheid South Africa

Shireen Hassim Turning Gender Rights into Entitlements: Women and Welfare Provision in Postapartheid South Africa THE TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA WAS MARKED BY THE extent to which women mobilized to ensure that the new political system would be accessible to women’s participation and that policy outcomes would be gender equitable.’ Arguments for gender equality were pursued in tandem with those for social rights. As a consequence, both are conceived as integral to citizenship in democratic South Africa. The constitution imposes particular responsibilities on government to address socioeconomic inequalities as part of a progressive realization of human rights and in ways that erode gender inequalities in addi­ tion to race inequalities (Liebenberg, 1998). The constitutional obliga­ tions are enacted by the creation of an institutional framework (called the national machinery for women) to ensure the inclusion of gender equality concerns in policy formulation. In the early 1990s, women’s organizations, led by the Women’s National Coalition, argued for the greater representation ofwomen in elected political bodies.1As a result of the successes of these strategies, the country has consistently been among the highest performers in the world in terms of the numbers of women elected to political office. social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 621 These developments created the expectation that social and economic policies would follow suit in placing the expansion of women’s social rights at the core of government priorities. However, South Africa’s political representation performance in the 10 years since the inception of democracy significantly outstrips its perfor­ mance in improving women’s economic position. On the Gender and Development Index of the United Nations, South Africa ranks nineti­ eth out of 144 countries. Clearly, political presence does not necessar­ ily mean that poor women’s interests will be adequately addressed in economic and social policy. Poor women are in many respects South Africa’s most vulnerable citizens. Statistics for a 2003 South African labor force study showed that women on the whole had lower incomes, higher unemployment rates, and less access to assets than men (Seidman-Makgetla, 2004:2). African women make up 42 percent of the workforce but only 30 percent of the employed population. Young African women are even worse off, with African women under the age of 30 facing an unemployment rate of 75 percent. Those women who are employed find themselves in the poorest-paying sectors of the labor market, notably in domestic and retail work. In 2003, 96 percent of domestic workers were black (that is, African, Indian, and Colored) women. In South Africa “Colored” refers to people who were designated “mixed race” under apartheid. It remains a demographic categoiy and to some extent a political identity in postapartheid South Africa.) Ninety-three percent of these workers earned under 1,000 rand (R) (approximately $180) per month (SeidmanMakgetla , 2004: 7). African rural women are the poorest category of citizens: in 1997, 65 percent of African female-headed households in rural areas were poor compared to 54 percent of male-headed house­ holds (Seidman-Makgetla, 2004: 40). At 29.4 percent, the mortality rate among African women was more than twice that of white women in 1994 (11.5 percent) (Seidman-Makgetla, 2004:41). It has been estimated that 53 percent of South Africans, including 60 percent of the coun­ try’s children, live in households with the lowest per capita consump­ tion (Samson, 2002: 71). On the UN Gender and Development Index, 622 social research even though women and men had comparable school enrollment and adult literacy ratios, men earned more than twice women’s earnings (Budlender, 2003:10). These gender vulnerabilities are compounded by the HIV/AIDs pandemic. African women are most vulnerable to HIV infection, more women than men are HIV positive, and women are more likely to become infected at a younger age than men. The pandemic imposes additional burdens on women in their roles as primary carers of family members who are HIV positive. These caring tasks, moreover, have to be performed in the context of poor basic services such as the availabil­ ity of electricity, clean water, and modern sanitation. Given these gendered social and economic patterns, this arti...

Women, Work and Equal Opportunities in Post-Communist Transition

This article examines gender, work and equal opportunities (EO) in five central eastern European (CEE) candidates to an enlarged European Union (EU): the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia. It demonstrates how capitalist transition has eroded women's Communist economic and social legacy, and considers implications for EO of the EU enlargement process. Analysis of decline begins with an outline of women's position under Communism, showing both similarities in gender inequality to those of capitalism, but also significant differences and advances. Post-transition is then examined in terms of the UN Gender Development Index, women's loss of social support, their decline in labour force participation and changes in employment and political representation. A limitation in available data is lack of information on unregulated employment and informal work - both major developments in CEE. The objective picture is then set against subjective responses to change - a key factor in gender EO prospects. Finally, developments in EO monitoring and enforcement agencies are reviewed, with the conclusion drawing these levels of enquiry together to assess the possibilities of EU enlargement as a spur to greater commitment to gender equality in CEE.