Gender Equality: One Size Fits All?

I came across this recently released “Global Gender Gap Report” a couple weeks ago: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2013.pdf I thought it was really interesting and relevant to share with this class. I didn’t keep track of the article that I read which referenced this (I think it just shared 10 biggest/smallest gaps by country), but the report itself has a lot to analyze.

With respect to this past week’s topic of sexuality in development, this Report does not acknowledge the topic at all. This demonstrates just how easily sexuality is not included in large studies like this one. In a way, with what we’ve been reading and discussing in class, this could be to a fault. Reports like this reinforce the perspective that gender is a binary topic, and leaving out sexuality leaves a lot of questions to be answered.

I think Corrêa and Jolly’s chapter that we reviewed for last weeks class is suitable as a reference for critiques for the Global Gender Gap Report’s approach to gender. A simple male/female approach to gender inequality is a lot like “sex essentialism” as they describe in the beginning of the chapter. A more constructivist approach, as Corrêa and Jolly suggest might even consider different variables for each country’s context. Another thing that surprised me was that, having searched through the document, I could not find definitions or indicators of how male and female were defined. This leaves a gap for “other genders” and perhaps disregards transgender all together. If transgender was included, how did the report categorize them?

I also found it interesting that none of the variables in the Global Gender Gap Index involved domestic or household matters. There was also disregard to the informal labor sector. Just from observing the variable and their sources of data (World Economic Forum), there seems to be a bias of what constitutes equality.

An intersectional approach to a study like this would identify more specific inequalities. If sexuality, class, and race were also measured in a gender gap study, I think the results would be much more useful for the sake of bringing to light specific inequalities and for building development projects in specific contexts. Sharma’s chapter on language use in human rights points out the harm that assumptions of heteronormativity can have in attempts to make positive change. She makes the argument in favor for intersectional analysis on the claim that it “…recognizes that any attempt to isolate one dimension will constitute a limited approach that fails to address the underlying interplay of forces.” (p.70) So this leads me to think that just a binary comparison of gender across all countries is too simplistic to make serious conclusions about gender equity.