Language, Cognition and Gender

This longitudinal evaluation of gender inequalities and economic growth addresses key questions in the evolving debate over the character of gender differentiation and the goals of womens empowerment. These questions include: 1) whether the impact of strategies of economic growth served to enhance or undermine the status of women; 2) whether changes in the status of women were accompanied by significant changes in gender inequality; and 3) the implications for existing debates. Section I reviews several sets of literature pertinent to the questions using three general approaches: modernization-neoclassical women in development and gender and development. Section II presents the data and methods used in the evaluation. The research assessed the contending interpretations reviewed in the first section by combining another set of cross-sectional and longitudinal data on womens status and inequalities between men and women with other existing indicators. Section III discusses the results in the following order: 1) cross-sectional patterns in womens status; 2) trends in womens status; 3) cross-sectional patterns in inequality between men and women; 4) trends in inequality between men and women; and 5) conclusion. Finally section IV presents an overall discussion of the findings of the whole longitudinal evaluation.

<p>The investigative aim of this thesis is to explore the recontextualization of the normative discourse of gender equality in Kenya’s policy discourse of women’s rights. Its purpose is threefold: Firstly, it attempts to examine the different ways in which policy makers use language in the course of interpreting and implementing gender equality policies. This includes a focus on both the linguistic and rhetorical/discursive strategies that these policy makers employ for such functions as endorsing, negotiating, legitimating, or even contesting given policy proposals. Secondly, the thesis endeavours to bring to light the different and changing conceptions of gender (in)equality espoused by the various policy actors involved in Kenya’s policy discourse of women’s rights over a critical ten-year period between 1995 and 2005. These policy actors include the Kenyan government; women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who actively seek to influence government policy; and the United Nations’ organizations with responsibility for ensuring the implementation of women’s human rights. Thirdly, the thesis attempts to show the extent to which policy initiatives proposed by the human rights-based women’s NGOs in Kenya are taken up in the texts produced by the Kenyan government. In order to gain a better understanding of the discursive interactions between and amongst the policy actors in this study, an intertextual approach to Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) was used. The thesis drew discourse samples for analysis from the Kenyan government’s periodic reports detailing progress towards fully meeting the terms of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the documents produced by the Committee overseeing the Convention that provided assessment of the Kenyan government’s reports; the Kenyan government’s official texts on gender policy; and Kenyan women NGOs’ annual reports and other texts. Though many scholars and researchers of women’s rights praise the UN Committee’s imperatives for bringing about policy changes concerning women’s rights globally, the findings from this study confirm that the Committee for CEDAW has only textual power, and that it lacks enforcement powers to ensure the implementation of the universal rights of women within the local milieu. In a similar vein, this study demonstrates that though the women’s NGOs play a significant role both in terms of identifying important areas of concern for policy intervention, and in necessitating changes in the genres of the national government, their participation has largely failed to ensure the Kenyan government’s epistemological shift from its current state of recognizing the existence of women’s rights, to the phase of implementing them. This thesis also establishes that differing conceptions of gender (in)equality and ideological differences between the Committee for CEDAW and the Kenyan government tend to influence both the Committee’s and the Kenyan government’s use of varied discourses, genres, and styles, with the intent of manipulating to outmanoeuvre one another. This means that both the Kenyan government and the Committee live in different worlds, suggesting a continuing gap between the Committee’s normative knowledge of women’s rights to gender equality, and the Kenyan government’s cultural relativist perspectives concerning such rights. As a solution to these power struggles and political differences that derail policy making on gender equality, this study recommends the need both for the Committee and the Kenyan government to employ a reflexive and pragmatic mix of both the universalist and cultural relativist approaches to gender equality. This will bring forth shared areas of interest concerning women’s rights between the UN and the Kenyan government, based on their applicability within the local context. Moreover, such an approach will create a possibility for the Committee to understand the Kenyan government’s cultural relativist/competing discourse of women’s rights as another way of conceiving gender equality (i.e. productive power-knowledges), rather than viewing them as irrelevant cultural claims that stand in stark opposition to the universal understandings of women’s rights to gender equality. Likewise, the aforesaid reflexive and pragmatic mix of approaches will help the Kenyan policy makers to develop a more critical and nuanced view of the universal approaches to gender equality, thereby reducing their varied forms of resistance to gender equality via subtle evasive strategies. Methodologically, this thesis shows how a comparative intertextual approach to Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis can be used as a framework for establishing the relations between policy text and context. This framework includes the micro-level of textual/linguistic analysis, the meso level of discursive interactions, and the macro level of socio-cultural practice at the local, institutional, and societal levels. Theoretically, the thesis demonstrates the different ways in which particular philosophical arguments and emancipatory concepts from Foucault’s theory of governmentality and transnational feminist rhetorical theory can be combined and exploited by linguists to promote different ways of theorizing and thinking concerning the development of policies for promoting gender equality.</p>

Tourism and gender (in)equality: Global evidence

Despite the numerical predominance of women in higher education institutions (HEIs), significant underrepresentation in academic and leadership positions persists, highlighting ongoing gender inequalities. This study examines the role of management in addressing gender disparities and offensive behaviors within a Portuguese public HEI, using psychosocial safety climate (PSC) theory as a conceptual framework. We conducted two studies involving 405 participants—students and staff—to assess perceptions of gender equality and the impact of a management-promoted work-life balance culture (WLBC). Our findings reveal that active management engagement in gender equality is significantly correlated with reduced perceptions of gender inequality among both students and staff. However, gender differences emerged, with female participants reporting a higher perception of gender inequality. Despite notable improvements in gender perceptions, the reduction in reported offensive behaviors was not statistically significant, underscoring the complexity of addressing such behaviors through management interventions alone. Mediation analyses indicated that WLBC indirectly influences perceptions of gender inequality and offensive behaviors through its impact on work-family conflict (WFC), highlighting WFC as a significant mediator. This research underscores the importance of a proactive managerial approach in fostering an inclusive academic environment and demonstrates the nuanced role of WLBC and WFC in mediating gender equality outcomes.

Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines the representations of gender relations in a popular English textbook series used in primary schools in the Philippines, which is a highly-ranked country in global gender equality indices. It seeks to analyse the persistence of gender inequality in textbooks in a context that is fairly favourable for the promotion of gender equality. The findings indicate that overall gender inequality remains in favour of males. The persistence of male dominance overall despite demonstrable pro-women proclivities of the authors/editors may be a reflection of the enduring gender gap in the country, particularly in economic and political spheres. The implications are rather sobering. If achieving gender equality remains a challenge even among the highly-ranked countries like the Philippines, how much more is the case for over a hundred of lower-ranked countries?

Gender inequity is proposed as a societal-level risk factor for child maltreatment. However, most cross-national research examining this association is limited to developing countries and has used limited measures of gender inequity and child homicides as a proxy for child maltreatment. To examine the relationship between gender inequity and child maltreatment, we used caregivers' reported use of severe physical punishment (proxy for physical abuse) and children under 5 left alone or under the care of another child younger than 10 years of age (supervisory neglect) and three indices of gender inequity (the Social and Institutional Gender Index, the Gender Inequality Index, and the Gender Gap Index) from 57 countries, over half of which were developing countries. We found all three gender inequity indices to be significantly associated with physical abuse and two of the three to be significantly associated with neglect, after controlling for country-level development. Based on these findings, efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect might benefit from reducing gender inequity.

Two key value issues in youth sports development intersect in this article: 1) gender equality, and 2) the opportunity for youths to voice their concerns about their own participation. The purpose is to explore ‘gender equality’ as a topic of deliberation in Swedish youth sport, and specifically young sports person’s possibilities for speaking out about gender equality issues. The article draws on material from an interview study with 17 leaders and coaches, and 24 teenage athletes, with a particular attention on a focus group interview with three young badminton players. The findings indicate a dominating discourse about sport and gender that may contribute to undermine both the legitimacy of gender equality efforts and the opportunity for youths to voice their concerns. According to most leaders and coaches in the study, no problems with gender equality exist. However, some of the athletes voice experiences of injustice in their sports participation. At the same time, they indicated that talking about perceived injustice can be problematic in a sporting context. The article concludes that that there is ample room for creating opportunities for young athletes to systematically voice their concerns about their own participation, for example concerning gender (in)equality.

A premise of this article is that the existing gap between the advanced gender equality normative framework and the state of gender equality in real life has widened in times of crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic. The background theoretical-methodological framework is presented in the introduction. The first chapter presents progressive gender equality achievements in the normative and strategic international, European and national framework. The next chapter explains why all crises have been worsening gender (in)equality in real life and even within the scope of already achieved rights. The third chapter outlines the negative impacts of COVID-19 on gender equality and living conditions of women globally, in the EU and Serbia. The fourth chapter addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic could contribute to advancing gender equality. The conclusion sums up the main topics of analysis and considers challenges related to the pandemic’s possible positive impacts on gender equality.

This study investigates the effectiveness of gender-mainstreamed aid in mitigating gender inequality. We develop a robust theoretical model that accounts for the potential positive and perceived negative effects of shifts toward gender parity, capturing diverse societal perspectives. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset on aid activities focused on gender (in)equality and women’s empowerment across 118 countries from 2009 to 2022, primarily low-income nations, we employ panel fixed-effects and mixed-effects random coefficient models to examine the impact of gender-related aid on gender inequality. Our findings reveal that significant gender-related aid (SGRA), which integrates gender considerations into broader development projects, reduces gender inequality in 115 out of 118 countries. In contrast, principal gender-related aid (PGRA), which explicitly targets gender equality, shows significant effects in only 85 countries. When analyzing the effects of both components of gender-related aid, we find that SGRA consistently impacts gender inequality. However, the effectiveness of PGRA becomes less clear-cut. This observation, coupled with the variation in the effectiveness of the components across countries, underscores the importance of developing strategies tailored to country-specific needs and conditions in promoting gender parity effectively.

Mainstream pornography is popular, freely accessible, and infused with themes of male dominance, aggression, and female subservience. Through depicting sex in these ways, mainstream pornography has the potential to influence the further development of harmful sexual scripts that condone or endorse violence against women and girls. These concerns warrant the adoption of a harms-based perspective in critical examinations of pornography's influence on sexual experiences. This chapter reports on findings from interviews with 24 heterosexual emerging adults living in Aotearoa/New Zealand about how pornography has impacted their lives. Despite a shared awareness among participants of mainstream pornography's misogynistic tendencies, and the potential for harm from those displays, men's and women's experiences were profoundly gendered. Men's reported experiences were often associated with concerns about their own sexual behaviors, performances, and/or abilities. Conversely, women's experiences were often shaped by how pornography had affected the way that men related to them sexually. Their experiences included instances of sexual coercion and assault which were not reported by the men. These findings signal the need for a gendered lens, situated within a broader harms-based perspective, in examinations of pornography's influence.

Association between gender equality and climate adaptation across the globe: an ecological study

Feminism is for everybody

BackgroundAmref Health Africa, with support from Global Affairs Canada, examines if women's access to reproductive health services in Tanzania is affected by Gender social norms, decision-making power, roles and responsibility, and access to resources in relation to the utilization of reproductive Health Services in Tanzania. A Gender Need Assessment (GNA) was conducted in five districts in ' 'Tanzania Simiyu Region to improve the infrastructure, supply, quality, and demand for integrated Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, and Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH), Nutrition, and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) services. The analysis identifies gender as a fundamental maternal and child health driver through existing gender inequality at the household and community levels that dictates women's status.MethodsThe qualitative assessment involved data collected from gender- and age-desegregated focus group discussions (FGDs) and in-depth interviews (IDIs) of key informants in three districts; Bariadi, Busega, and Meatu, in Simiyu region, Tanzania. Participants comprised 8-10 married women and men, unmarried women and men, and adolescent boys and girls. A total of 129 participants were involved in the FGDs.ResultsThis paper reports the critical drivers influencing gender inequality in Simiyu by detailing how Gender inequality affected women's access to reproductive health care in relation to; gender social norms, decision-making power, access to resources at the household and community level, roles and responsibilities, including men's and 'boys' roles are more valued than the roles and responsibilities of women and girls resulted to limited free time to do things for themselves, such as visiting the health facilities for RMNCAH.ConclusionsThis paper explored gender-based enablers and/or barriers influencing women and girls' realization of their sexual and reproductive health and rights. It was found that social norms, decision-making powers, and lack of access to and control over resources presented as key barriers. In contrast, continuous community sensitization and increased scope of women's participation in decision-making served as enabling environment to overcome gender inequities that influence woman's use of RMNCAH services in Tanzania. Such insights will shape interventions geared towards valuing differences in a manner that overcome gender inequities that influence woman's use of RMNCAH services in Tanzania.

Understanding gender issues and gender inequalities in development is one of the keys to success in realizing gender equality. Indonesia after the Reformation era experienced a transformation in encouraging gender equality in various developments. The success and failure of gender development can be measured through the Human Development Index, Gender Development Index, Gender Empowerment Index, and Gender Equality and Inequality Index. This research method is qualitative through an approach to gender issues in Indonesia with in-depth analysis based on literature study data including official documents, online news, books, and previous research articles with a development perspective. The research results explain that gender equality in Indonesia have not yet shown significant progress. One of the obstacles that remain is the low level of understanding of gender issues and gaps in development among society in general and programs planners, as well as development policymakers at both the Government and Regional government levels in particular.

ObjectivesPrevious research has shown a relationship between social and economic equality and trust, but the relationship between gender equality and trust has received relatively little attention. This study addresses that lacuna and analyzes the relationship between gender equality and political trust as well as social trust.MethodsUsing the 2015 Latinobarómetro, we test the relationship between two types of gender equality, labor gender equality and overall gender equality, and two types of trust, political trust and social trust in a series of regressions.ResultsThe results show that gender equality is positively associated with social and political trust. In particular, the magnitude of association of labor gender equality with social trust is greater than that of overall gender equality. Also, the magnitude of association of overall gender equality with political trust is greater than that of labor gender equality.ConclusionsOur article contributes to the literature by demonstrating that overall gender equality and labor gender equality have varying association with trust depending on types of trust.