Tackling social norms: A game changer for gender inequalities

Tackling social norms: A game changer for gender inequalities is a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report published on March 5, 2020. The report is a collaboration between the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office and the UNDP Gender Team. It is substantially based on research conducted for the Human Development Report 2019, published by UNDP in December 2019.The report notes that the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 1995, was followed by remarkable achievements in women’s education and health. (The Declaration, adopted by the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing on September 1995, contains a blueprint for advancing women’s rights.) However, the Human Development Report 2019 indicates that the overall progress in attaining gender equality – based on health, education and economic status – has been slowing in recent years.The report discusses the gender social norms index (GSNI), which measures how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in areas like politics, work and education. It contains GSNI data for 75 countries, covering over 80 per cent of the world’s population. The data indicates that large sections of men and women continue to oppose gender equality – “hold biases against” it – and that most countries indicate an increase in such biases.