What is the Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI)?
- It measures how social beliefs obstruct gender equality in areas like politics, work, and education, and contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population.
Who releases it?
- The Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) is released by United Nations Development Programme that measures how social beliefs affect gender equality.
Key findings of the Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) 2020
- The analysis reveals that, despite decades of progress closing the equality gap between men and women, close to 90 percent of men and women hold some sort of bias against women, providing new clues to the invisible barriers women face in achieving equality.
- According to the index, about half of the world’s men and women feel that men make better political leaders, and over 40 percent feel that men make better business executives and that men have more right to a job when jobs are scarce.
- The publication also includes the GSNI trends for 31 countries, representing 59 percent of the global population.
- According to GSNI, nearly half of the world’s population believe it is men who make better leaders. About 40 per cent of people believe that men make better business executives.
- The total number of female heads of government is actually lower than what it was five years ago, down to 10 from 15 in 2014, as per the study.
- The study found that there were no countries in the world with gender equality.
- Surprisingly, 28 per cent of men and women feel men are justified in beating their wives.
- The trends show that while in some countries there have been improvements, in others, attitudes appear to have worsened in recent years, signaling that progress cannot be taken for granted.
Source: UNDP
