by Mary Manning, Heidelberg IWC
The march toward equal rights for women can often seem to be a process of one step forward and two steps back. Glimpses of progress – the global awareness-raising of harassment and assault in the workplace spurred by the #metoo campaign – can often be accompanied by unintended and unforeseen backlash – an expectation that men would become reluctant to work with women, hindering their advancement. And this type of backlash is certainly nothing new. Use of the word “bitch” as a form of gender-based abuse surged in the period between 1915 and 1930 in the United States, at least partly due to the suffrage movement that fought to obtain voting rights for women in 1920.
The 2020 EU Gender Equality Index, published last October, tracks the progress of gender equality in EU Member States and provides interesting insights into our society’s seeming inability (or unwillingness) to make meaningful advances in this area.
2020 EU Gender Equality Index
Developed by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), it measures gender equality in 6 “core domains” – i.e., work, money, knowledge, power, time and health. Unfortunately, the domain of violence against women is not included in the overall score, mainly due to data collection issues, although the EIGE is working to standardize the methodology so that this important issue can be incorporated into future reports.
Core Domains of the Gender Equality Index
Here are some of the key findings:1
• The overall score for the EU in the 2020 Index stands at 67.9 points, out of a possible 100 representing perfect equality, with an improvement of only 4.1 points since 2010. At the current pace, it will take 60 years to achieve gender equality in the EU.
• The main driver of this small improvement over the last 10 years is the domain of power, which has improved by 11.6 points. The improvements in this domain are mainly the result of initiatives requiring national parliaments to increase female representation as well as some countries (such as France and Italy) requiring corporate boards to increase the numbers of female directors. However, the overall score for power remains the lowest of all six domains, at only 53.5.
• In the domain of work, increases in the number of women employed have been offset by persistent gender segregation across occupations. In addition, although the overall gender gap in full-time employment has decreased since 2010, it is actually worsening for the most vulnerable groups: single parents, people with migrant backgrounds, and those with low educational attainment.
One of the critical issues that has implications in each of the domains is the unequal distribution of care and other household responsibilities. The pressure from unpaid work impacts a woman’s employment opportunities, especially full-time labor (work domain), which has obvious implications for her financial stability (money), her ability to engage in adult learning activities to advance or change her career (knowledge), her access to decision-making and political representation (power), and her ability to engage in leisure and social activities (time), which then has obvious implications for her physical and mental well-being (health).
A key EU policy to address this issue, the Work-Life Balance Directive, seeks to direct EU funding to support quality childcare and long-term care. However, care activities (whether for children or elderly relatives) represent only a portion of the family responsibilities that fall disproportionately on women. The policy, and the Index, do little to address the other unpaid work that women shoulder. In fact, in measuring the domain of time, participants are simply asked about the time spent in care activities and time spent cooking and doing housework. It makes no attempt to capture the “mental load” or “cognitive labor” carried by women – that is, the time spent not in doing the chores, but rather organizing them. One study defines this mental load as the responsibility of “anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress.” It is the labor that is often most exhausting for women, and it’s not just unpaid, it’s often completely unacknowledged (as evidenced by its absence from the Index).
Women’s struggle to be fully recognized and valued members of society is certainly not new. Indeed, it was nearly 230 years ago that Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the first works of feminist philosophy. But despite all the attention this issue has attracted, especially in recent years, it will no doubt be frustrating for women to see such stark evidence that there is still much to be done.
1The data used for the 2020 Index is from 2018. Therefore, while the report included some initial findings of the pandemic’s effects on the various domains, in particular the sharp drop in employment for women, increased need for childcare, and the risk of violence and isolation, the data was preliminary and not included in the scoring.
Graphics used with permission of the EIGE.