Around 90% of people worldwide are somehow biased against women, based on the new analysis released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
According to the new Gender Social Norms Index, half of the world perceive men as better political leaders. Moreover, over 40 percent of survey participants see men as better business executives and that they are entitled to a job despite scarcity of jobs.
One of the most controversial results is that 28 percent of the participants deem physical abuse of a woman could be justified for men.
The index reveals how gender equality in areas like politics, education, and employment is hindered by social beliefs. The analysis reflects data from 75 countries, with over 80 percent of the world’s population.
The new analysis suggests that despite efforts to close the equality gap between men and women, women still face barriers in trying to achieve equality.
“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 enrollment and reduced maternal mortality by 45 percent since the year 1990,” said Pedro Conceição, head of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office.
“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,” he added.
Based on the index, only six out of 75 countries studied had the majority of people held no bias towards women.
Findings show that only 24 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women. Meanwhile, only 10 female heads of government exist while less than six percent of chief executive officer’s in S&P 500 companies are female.
Conceição said that perceptions and expectations in society about the role of women are prejudiced against them. “While in many countries these biases are shrinking, in many others the biases are actually sliding back. If you take the overall average of the information we have, we show that on average we are sliding back – that biases, instead of shrinking, are growing back,” he added.
