Tag Archives: Gender

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Economists distinguish between open and hidden unemployment, and I think it is possible to introduce a similar distinction in the area of gender inequality.

I will define open gender inequality as that which is reflected in all the traditional gender indicators, such as gender gaps in school enrolment, gender differences in labour market participation rates, gender pay gaps, etc. I would usually have referred to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators for such data, but they have been updating their website, and I can’t find anything anymore. The United Nations system for SDG indicators is even worse. Instead, Our World in Data has vastly improved, so that is my new go-to site for all kinds of development statistics, including gender inequality data (https://sdg-tracker.org/gender-equality).

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

There has been a lot of focus lately on the extreme levels of gender inequality in economics (e.g. Economics is the most dismal of sciences in terms of gender inequality). According to the IDEAS/RePEc ranking of more than 50 thousand economists in the world, only 19% of registered economists are women, and they are much rarer than that among the top ranked economists (https://ideas.repec.org/top/#authorscountry).

Typically, there are only about a handful of women among the top 100 economists in any particular country. In the Netherlands there is just 1, in the United States 3, in Canada 4, in Sweden 5, in the UK, Germany, Norway and Italy 8, and Denmark seems to hold the record with 10. (Do let me know in the comments below if you find a country with more than 10 women among the top 100 economists according to RePEc, because I didn’t check the countries with names that were too unfamiliar to me).

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

According to The World Bank’s World Development Indicators, there are now more or less an equal number of boys and girls enrolled in primary and secondary school around the World. The worldwide Gender Parity Index has been going up steadily over the last several decades, reaching 99 girls for every 100 boys in 2014, and at this rate of change we would have reached parity last year. This is due to dramatic improvements in girls’ enrolment in Africa and Asia. In Latin America and the Caribbean, in contrast, there have been more girls enrolled than boys already since the early 1980s (see Figure 1).

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Poverty is usually measured at the household level, and since there is pretty much the same number of women as men in each household, poverty rates have almost by definition been identical for men and women. This fact, however, has not prevented thousands of articles from claiming that “poverty has a female face” (1). The perception that women are more likely to be poor is almost universal, despite the lack of empirical evidence.

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Since the 1995 United Nations Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, the world of development has been obsessed with the idea of mainstreaming ‘gender’ throughout aid delivery programs and operations. Nowhere has this been more true than in Africa. So, almost two decades later, has gender mainstreaming succeeded? And if not, what has been the reality and how should the world move forward? The Development Roast sat down with the incredibly inspiring Khadija Bah-Wakefield to learn from her quarter century career as a senior gender and socioeconomic advisor to the World Bank, different factions of the United Nations, West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development, New Partnership for Africa’s Development and many other donor groups in over twenty African countries*. Read More »

What would you do if you were the mother of a young girl born into a social setting where her gender automatically affects her chances of independence, riches and success? Most of us live in such societies as gender imbalances are institutionalised and pervasive the world over. Take the recently exposed gender gap in US election coverage published by 4thEstate.net that showed that even on important issues specifically facing women (such as reproductive health, birth control, women’s rights), the US media consulted the voices of actual women only 12-31% of the time. Read More »