« Previous |
1 - 10 of 20
|
Next »
Number of results to display per page
Search Results
2. Gender Gaps in Education: The Long View
- Author:
- David Evans, Maryam Akmal, and Pamela Jakiela
- Publication Date:
- 01-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Many countries remain far from achieving gender equality in the classroom. Using data from 126 countries between 1960 and 2010, we document four facts. First, women are more educated today than fifty years ago in every country in the world. Second, they remain less educated than men in the vast majority of countries. Third, in many countries with low levels of education for both men and women in 1960, gender gaps widened as more boys went to school, then narrowed as girls enrolled; thus, gender gaps got worse before they got better. Fourth, gender gaps rarely persist in countries where boys are attaining high levels of education. Most countries with large, current gender gaps have low levels of male educational attainment. Many also perform poorly on other measures of development such as life expectancy and GDP per capita. Improving girls’ education is an important goal in its own right, but closing gender gaps in education will not be sufficient to close critical gaps in adult life outcomes.
- Topic:
- Education, Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Inequality, Feminism, and Equality
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
3. From Principles to Practice: Strengthening Accountability for Gender Equality in International Development
- Author:
- Megan O'Donnell
- Publication Date:
- 01-2020
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Existing accountability mechanisms focused on global gender equality are largely retrospective in nature. Where mechanisms do probe at governments’ commitments to future progress, they often lack accompanying incentive structures (“carrots and sticks”) to encourage ambition. Countries re- port their progress implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Beijing Platform for Action, participate in annual Commission on the Status of Women sessions, and touch on gender equality as part of voluntary national review reporting for the Sustainable Development Goals. Although these processes, among others, provide an opportu- nity for country reflection and for civil society engagement, they do not mandate that governments establish and adhere to forward-looking, specific commitments detailing how they aim to promote gender equality. The absence of future commitments makes it difficult for civil society actors to hold governments to account according to well-defined metrics. At the same time, governments and women’s rights advo- cates worldwide are increasingly discussing and adopting “feminist foreign policies” and “gender-re- sponsive budgeting.” There is a need to clearly define with robust and transparent metrics what these terms mean and how to hold countries who claim to be “feminist” and “gender-responsive” account- able for ambitious progress, while also encouraging other countries to increasingly prioritize gender equality.
- Topic:
- Development, Gender Issues, Inequality, Feminism, and Equality
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
4. Gendered Language
- Author:
- Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier
- Publication Date:
- 01-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than 99 percent of the world’s population. We find a robust negative cross-country relationship between prevalence of gender languages and women’s labor force participation and educational attainment. We replicate these associations in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, showing that educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages use grammatical gender.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Language, Masculinity, and Femininity
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5. Women and the Future of Work: Fix the Present
- Author:
- Charles Kenny
- Publication Date:
- 02-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- There is a lot we don’t know about what automation will mean for jobs in the future, including its impact (if any) on gender inequality. This note reviews evidence and forecasts on that question and makes four main points: Past automation has been (broadly) positive for women’s average quality of life, economic empowerment, and equality. Forecasts of the gendered impact of automation and AI going forward based on the current distribution of employment suggest considerable uncertainty and a gender inequality of impact that is marginal compared to the potential impact overall. The bigger risk—and/or opportunity—is likely to be in the combined impact of automation, policy, and social norms in changing the type of work that is seen as male or female. Minimizing any potential aggravating impact of automation and AI on inequalities in economic power in the future can best be achieved by maximizing economic equality today.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Employment, Inequality, and Feminism
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
6. After 2020: What’s Next for Global Access to Family Planning
- Author:
- Felice Apter, Amanda Glassman, and Janeen Madam Keller
- Publication Date:
- 05-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Next week, Women Deliver—the world’s largest conference on gender equality and the health, rights, and wellbeing of women and girls—will kick off. At just around 200 days before the calendar turns to 2020, this conference is an opportunity for the family planning (FP) community—including the FP2020 Core Partners (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, UNFPA, and USAID) and Reference Group—to review lessons from the past eight years and look forward beyond 2020, the landmark that has long dominated FP discussions. The key question: In a rapidly changing context, how can the FP community sustain gains and realize the benefits of high-quality FP access in low- and middle-income countries, including lower maternal mortality, better newborn and child health, and increased women’s empowerment?[1] This note highlights three issues for the global FP movement post-2020, building on CGD’s engagement in this space, including our working group on alignment in family planning.[2] We review the underlying critical assumptions in FP2020’s initial design along with their strengths and weaknesses, and place future approaches squarely within the context of today’s evolving landscape—one that looks very different than the year 2012, when FP2020 was launched.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Feminism, Family Planning, and Sex Education
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
7. Removing Barriers and Closing Gaps: Improving Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for Rohingya Refugees and Host Communities
- Author:
- Liesl Schnabel and Cindy Huang
- Publication Date:
- 06-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- In August 2017, widespread violence carried out with “genocidal intent” in Myanmar forced 745,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh and settle in camps in Cox’s Bazar.[1] Fifty-two percent of the refugee population there are women and girls.[2] Those of reproductive age are in dire need of emergency and longer-term sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)[3] services. Many have additional needs related to sexual trauma experienced in Myanmar and/or in Bangladesh.[4],[5] For many, these needs are not being fully met due to implementation and access barriers.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Health, Women, Reproductive Rights, and Sexual Health
- Political Geography:
- Asia and Myanmar
8. Unequal Ventures: Results from an Endline Study of Gender and Entrepreneurship in East Java, Indonesia
- Author:
- Mayra Buvinic, Erika Deserranno, Hillary C. Johnson, James C. Knowles, Gianmarco Leon, and Firman Witoelar
- Publication Date:
- 07-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- This report presents the endline results of a randomized controlled trial in East Java, Indonesia, of demand- and supply-side interventions to increase the use of saving and other branchless banking services by women business owners.
- Topic:
- Development, Gender Issues, Women, Entrepreneurship, Business, Demand, Supply, Banking, and Business Management
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia and Asia
9. Gender Equality in US Think Tank Leadership: Data from Tax Records
- Author:
- Charles Kenny and Julian Duggan
- Publication Date:
- 11-2019
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Existing analysis of US think tanks suggests that women are underrepresented among senior staff, lead- ership, and board members. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Soraya Kamali-Nafar at Women In Interna- tional Security examined 22 Washington, DC-based think tanks working on foreign policy and national and international security, and they found that 68 percent of the heads of the think tanks were men, along with 73 percent of the experts and 78 percent of those on governing boards. In 2018, a random sampling of 10 leading US think tanks working on development by Charles Kenny and Tanvi Jaluka sug- gested that women made up 30 percent of high-paid employees and 10 percent of highest-paid employ- ees, and that higher-paid women earned only 75 percent that of higher-paid men. This note updates the 2018 analysis with a larger sample of think tanks covering a longer period and includes measures of think tank reach to examine if more established think tanks perform better or worse on gender equality within their senior ranks. Across the 71 think tanks for which we have data, we find that the average share of trustees and directors that were women was 23 percent, the average share of highly compensated employees that were women was 30 percent, and highly compensat- ed women were paid 92 percent of what highly compensated men were paid. Conservative-leaning think tanks performed notably worse than the average on the share of high-paid employees who were women, as did think tanks that worked on global development. Older think tanks saw worse gender pay ratios. Having a woman as CEO was not associated with greater pay equality. Analysis of the gen- der pay ratio suggest that it may be driven in part by a few very highly compensated men in senior positions, but also that, conditional on job title and think tank of employment, highly paid women are paid $30,000 less per year than highly paid men.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Leadership, Feminism, and Equality
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
10. Do Age-of-Marriage Laws Work? Evidence from a Large Sample of Developing Countries
- Author:
- Matt Collin and Theodore Talbot
- Publication Date:
- 06-2017
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Child marriage is associated with bad outcomes for women and girls. Although many countries have raised the legal age of marriage to deter this practice, the incidence of early marriage remains stubbornly high. We develop a simple model to explain how enforcing minimum age-of-marriage laws creates differences in the share of women getting married at the legal cut-off. We formally test for these discontinuities using multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in over 60 countries by applying statistical tests derived from the regression discontinuity literature. By this measure, most countries are not enforcing the laws on their books and enforcement is not getting better over time. Separately, we demonstrate that various measures of age-of-marriage discontinuities are systematically related to with existing, widely-accepted measures of rule-of-law and government effectiveness. A key contribution is therefore a simple, tractable way to monitor legal enforcement using survey data. We conclude by arguing that better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring in to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls.
- Topic:
- Development and Gender Issues
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus