At the rate things are going, we’ll have to wait. Expect. Expect. To wait about… 300 years to overcome all gender disparities on this planet, 286 years precisely. But, on this scale, we are no longer within thirteen years.
To arrive at this dizzying figure, the UN Women agency and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs reviewed all the possible and imaginable criteria: discriminatory laws, access to education, health, salaries and progression. hierarchy at work, legal protection, standard of living, representation in national parliaments – on this sole criterion, ladies, do not expect anything before 2060. The UN had however set, in its sustainable development objectives, the total equality of sexes by 2030. Want the inside scoop? We won’t make it.
Obviously, there are huge disparities depending on the country (or region of the world) where you live. But overall, experts say inequality is getting worse. The big culprit? The Covid-19. The UNDP, the program of theUN for development, believes in a report that, due to the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, the world has gone back five years in terms of development.
Life expectancy, for example, has decreased. It fell from 73 in 2019 to 71.4 in 2021. The report’s lead author, Pedro Conceicao, describes the decline as a “unprecedented shock”noting that some countries – including the United States – have seen declines of two years or more.
Health, education, standard of living: with the Covid, the world has gone back 5 years https://t.co/MzjTZl8U6X pic.twitter.com/nR1XzOrCIj
— Hubert MESSMER ♂️♂️ (@Zehub) September 8, 2022
This unprecedented decline in development is fueling social protest and concerns more than 90% of countries in the world. However, when poverty increases, more women than men suffer from it. The UN has made calculations: 383 million women and girls will live by the end of the year in extreme poverty, on less than 1.90 dollars a day. To this you can add wars and conflicts, climate change or governments going back on fundamental rights.
Some stories, however, can refute this trend… Like this couple of Turkish academics, from the Izmir region, who were the first to sign a “agreement on gender equalitybefore getting married this summer.
According to them “if there is no equality there can be no love“. In front of their witnesses and the mayor, Zeleha and Murat undertook to be “the two equal halves of an equal life“, a concept that does not appear anywhere in the texts governing traditional marriage, no more in Turkey than in the civil code in France. Their gesture is all the stronger since Turkey withdrew last year from the Istanbul Convention, a text that commits States to act against violence against women.