Why Does Gender Equality Differ Distinctly between Countries? Reconsidering Existing Hypotheses and Explanations

Timo Myllyntaus, Turku School of Economics

Social phenomena tend to be interconnected, while those interrelations have been generally constructed on complicated networks. For example, gender inequality presumably affects both individual and national wellbeing. However, it is even more byzantine to determine what factors create gender equality and what features generate inequality. There are countries where only a couple of per cent of young women has a university degree, while in some other countries, about two-thirds of just-graduated students are female. It is a well-known fact that gender equality differs noticeably from one country to another. The public discussion on this diversity tends to focus on countries with significant gender inequalities, while countries with the greatest gender equality are often neglected. One might expect that by comparing openly and analytically countries with more troubling and vulnerable gender inequality to those, which are in better positions in this respect, it would be possible to find more informative and more valuable results than focusing primarily on underperforming cases. Another misleading approach is to keep biased gender divisions caused only by relatively recent governments. As a rule, the current gender relations in schools, universities and working life result from long historical chains of events. Like food culture in the past, gender relations have changed very slowly until recent years. Therefore, we should examine gender distributions in an extended historical context. This preliminary working paper aims to examine gender inequalities from various aspects and new perspectives. It tries to develop new hypotheses and test them with cross-national comparative data. Furthermore, it attempts to trace possible connecting factors and links between equality and wellbeing.

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 Presented in Session 47. Gender Roles