Importance Of Gender Inequality

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Gender equality is a major issue amongst today’s current events. Organisations, groups and protests have sprung up in accordance with third wave feminism which shines light directly on women in the work force and their role in it. Whilst this has mainly been an issue dealt with by developed nations, a more inquisitive look into the role of gender equality can be found in the development of developing economies. Gender inequality is an issue that plagues developing nations and only through a thorough understanding of it can any important change be done. Whilst professionals in the field of development all agree that gender equality is critical, evidence can only be found in real world examples and theories that aim to improve equality. This …show more content…

These issues create hurdles in the way of gender equality, and slows it down in its progression to provide development to the global economy. In her book, “Risk, Vulnerability and Social Protection: International Perspectives”, Naila Kabeer outlines ‘A Three Dimensional Model’ to identify these issues. These three dimensions consist of; Gender specific constraints, gender intensified inequalities and imposed forms of gender disadvantage. Kabeer goes on to explain that gender specific constraints “are made up of those societal norms and practices that apply to women or men by virtue of their gender.” (Kabeer, 2014) This is to say that each gender is given a certain set of attributes by society, that defines their work life and the type of work they decide to do. Generally, women are seen as care takers and family orientate and gravitate towards those careers, whilst on the flip side men are seen to be emasculated when striving for the same jobs. Furthermore, Kabeer also describes that gender intensified inequalities deals with the idea that, “while inequalities between households reflect factors such as class, ethnicity, location and so on, there are additional inequalities between household members that reflect norms and customs governing the distribution of food, …show more content…

There are countless arguments and examples that support this idea and reasons for why gender equality is beneficial to economic growth in developing and emerging economies can be found in a recent report published by the International Monetary Fund entitled, “Women, Work and the Economy.” In it, statements such as “Better opportunities for women to earn and control income could contribute to broader economic development in developing economies,” and “Women contribute substantially to economic welfare through large amounts of unpaid work, such as child-rearing and household tasks,” (Elbourgh-Wotek, 2013) give an idea of how important the issue of gender equality is to the economies or developing and emerging nations. Allowing gender equality to thrive and survive in economies such as these opens up opportunities for growth and development as it taps into a platform that hasn’t been properly established and utilised yet. It has been proven that when women are given the same opportunity as men and gender boundaries are broken on a societal level then economic growth shortly follows More and more professionals in the field of development economies agree that gender equality is pivotal. In an article for the OECD, Mari Kiviniemi states that, “There can be no robust growth economy without gender equality, a critical ingredient of any strategy for durable resilient and more

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