This report examines how greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and make institutions more representative. Markets, institutions, and households play a role in reducing inequality and globalisation can provide important opportunities. Domestic actors need to focus on reducing female mortality, narrowing education and earnings disparities, increasing women’s voice, and limiting gender inequality across generations. The international community needs to ensure consistent support, improve the availability of gender-disaggregated data, and extend partnerships beyond governments and development agencies.
This report uses an economic lens to understand what drives differences in key aspects of welfare between men and women. In particular, the report examines education and health, access to economic opportunities and productive resources, and the ability to make effective choices and take action. The paper finds that:
- While gender equality is a core development objective in its own right, it is also smart economics. Greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and make institutions more representative.
- Development has closed a number of gender gaps in educational enrolment, life expectancy, and labour force participation.
- Gender disparities still remain in many areas. Female life expectancy is still significantly lower than male life expectancy in low- and middle-income countries. Girls have lower school enrolment rates than boys in many sub-Saharan countries and some parts of South Asia. Women tend to earn less than men. Women, especially poor women, have less say over household decisions.
To understand progress in closing gender gaps and the reasons for their persistence it is important to note that:
- Income growth by itself does not deliver greater gender equality on all fronts. Markets, institutions, and households play a role.
- Gender gaps persist where girls and women face other disadvantages such as poverty or issues related to remoteness, ethnicity, and disability.
- Markets, institutions, and households can combine to limit progress. Gender gaps are driven by gender differences in time use, rights of ownership and control over assets.
- Globalisation can help by connecting women to economic opportunities, reshaping attitudes about gender relations, and encouraging countries to promote gender equality.
The highest priorities for domestic policymakers are to:
- Reduce excess female deaths in infancy, early childhood, and the reproductive years through clean water, better sanitation, and improved maternal care.
- Reduce persisting educational gaps, for example through cash transfers conditioned on school attendance.
- Narrow gender disparities in earnings and productivity by: providing child care, improving infrastructure, improving women’s access to productive resources, and tackling information problems and institutional biases against women.
- Reduce gender differences in household and societal voice by increasing women’s control over household resources, strengthening women’s property rights, training future women leaders, involving women more in trade unions and professional associations, and through quotas on political representation.
- Limit the reproduction of gender inequality across generations through health and education programmes and facilitate the transition from school to work with job and life skills training programmes. Shift aspirations through exposure to role models.
The international community can play a role by:
- Adjusting current support to ensure it reaches disadvantaged girls and boys.
- Sustaining existing efforts focused on adolescent girls.
- Directing efforts and funding to support the poorest countries.
- Improving the availability of gender-disaggregated data.
- Fostering more experimentation and systematic evaluation.
- Extending partnerships to include the private sector, civil society organisations, and academic institutions.
