This report draws on conversations with 4,000 men and women from 20 countries about the effects of gender differences and inequalities on their lives, focusing on persistent social norms and their impact on agency. It finds that, while significant progress has been made on gender equality in many places, gender disparities are still evident, particularly regarding empowerment and agency. Evidence indicates that gender norms are being contested and relaxed (although not fully changed) with new economic opportunities, markets, and urbanisation. The process is, however, slow and incremental. Younger people may delay compliance to a later point in time, but the norms and the expectations around them do not change.
Gender equality in these 20 countries has increased in many domains. Girls are staying in school longer than their mothers did. More women are economically active and their participation in local networks and civic organizations has increased. Domestic violence is on the decline, more so in rural areas than in urban areas, and many women feel that they have more control over their lives.
Yet, significant gender disparities are still evident: intra-household allocations of time, responsibilities, and power are unequally distributed among men and women. Almost everywhere, men remain the primary income earners in their households, as well as the main decision-makers. In some communities, existing gender gaps are increased by income poverty, conflict situations, rurality, or distance.
The norms that underpin gender roles seem to be universal and resilient, as women and men of all generations in all research locations identified the dominance of women’s domestic role and men’s breadwinning role as core to female and male identities. Other key findings are that:
- Women are actively seeking equal power and freedom, but must constantly negotiate and resist traditional expectations about what they are to do and who they are to be. When women achieve the freedom to work for pay or get more education, they must still accommodate their gains to these expectations, especially on household responsibilities.
- The main pathways for women to gain agency are education, employment, and decreased risk of domestic violence. Girls’ desire for education, which nurtures their aspirations for greater agency, exceeded that of boys in rural and urban communities.
- Both young women and men wished for more education and better jobs than are common in their communities and strikingly wanted to marry later, bear children later, and have more autonomy in choosing their partners than traditional community norms dictated. When prompted to further describe what they thought were realistic outcomes, their predictions fell somewhere between current practices and their aspirations. This capacity to visualize a different path from the existing, accepted course to even a pragmatic midpoint is a positive feature that development interventions can build on.
- The impact of moral support for women is critical for their empowerment and perseverance to gain agency. If women in a community are being allowed more control over assets and diversification into economic roles, it leaves more room for negotiations for those women whose husbands or extended family want to resist change. This sense that a critical mass is developing can help accelerate reforms and has growing credibility in development project design.
- Regulations and laws regarding gender equality promoted some change when they were well publicised and well-enforced, but outreach and public understanding of the laws were very uneven. In general, people in urban areas had more knowledge of such laws and women were more in favour of these regulations than men. Men and women are rarely well-informed of their rights, entitlements, or obligations with respect to key laws intended to promote gender equality. More effective awareness-raising campaigns are needed to promote knowledge and enforcement of these laws.
