Only 131 years to go (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

The sky is dark, the kids are asleep, the weekend is finally here, and so are the reads — but not gender parity, unless you live in Iceland (well, almost)…

1) 131 years to equality

The World Economic Forum this week released the 17th edition of its annual index of global gender gaps. Iceland tops the ranking this year, and Afghanistan comes bottom. In 2020, the index predicted that, on current progress, it would take 100 years to reach global gender parity. Now that estimate has been revised to 131 years. Here’s more from the report:

Recent years have been marked by major setbacks for gender parity globally, with previous progress disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on women and girls in education and the workforce, followed by economic and geopolitical crises. Today, some parts of the world are seeing partial recoveries while others are experiencing deteriorations as new crises unfold.

Global gender gaps in health and education have narrowed over the past year, yet progress on political empowerment is effectively at a standstill, and women’s economic participation has regressed rather than recovered.

And also:

At the current rate of progress over the 2006- 2023 span, it will take 162 years to close the Political Empowerment gender gap, 169 years for the Economic Participation and Opportunity gender gap, and 16 years for the Educational Attainment gender gap. The time to close the Health and Survival gender gap remains undefined.

2) A crime of gender apartheid?

A UN special rapporteur said this week that the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls could be considered gender apartheid. The UN defines this as "economic and social sexual discrimination against individuals because of their gender or sex". As per the Reuters report:

"Grave, systematic and institutionalised discrimination against women and girls is at the heart of Taliban ideology and rule, which also gives rise to concerns that they may be responsible for gender apartheid," UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

…

"We have pointed to the need for more exploration of gender apartheid, which is not currently an international crime, but could become so," Bennett told reporters on the sidelines of the Council.

"It appears if one applies the definition of apartheid, which at the moment is for race, to the situation in Afghanistan and use sex instead of race, then there seem to be strong indications pointing towards that."

A Taliban spokesperson said this was “propaganda”.

3) Still relevant I’m afraid

Michelle Goldberg has picked Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women for an NYT feature on “piece(s) of culture that best capture” the US. She writes:

One of Faludi’s central insights was that backlashes rear up not when women have achieved equality but when they seem to be on the brink of achieving it. It’s a “pre-emptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line,” she wrote. America nearly elected a feminist president in 2016, and when it didn’t, women all over the country threw themselves into politics and into the movement to dethrone sexual abusers. The reaction has been a backlash that is in many ways more brutal and angry than what Faludi described, even if the fragmentation of American culture means it’s less all-encompassing.

“The great hope of a j’accuse is that it won’t be reprinted decades later, for the simple reason that by then you want it to be obsolete,” Faludi wrote in an introduction to the 2020 edition. Sadly, she has failed to achieve irrelevance.

4) New gender guidance for UK schools

Alongside AI regulation and economic growth, British PM Rishi Sunak seems to have made battling “gender ideology” a priority, too. In the latest in Sunak’s actions on this front, British tabloid The Sun this week reported that he is planning new guidance for schools on how to deal with students who identify as trans or non-binary. As per the report:

Schools will be banned from letting kids change their gender if their parents say no, The Sun can reveal.

And children who want to be called by another pronoun — he, she, they — will not be able to take part in competitive sport, under new government guidance to be published this week.

The report led to some uproar, and not just from “militant trans campaigners”, as the paper describes them. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, for one, said that “schools shouldn't tell parents if their children come out as trans as it's a safeguarding risk,” because children could be subject to abuse at home.

Relatedly, video has emerged of Sunak seeming to mock trans women.

5) Mafia mothers

In the mafia movies I love, like “Goodfellas” (I know, I’m cheesy), women are either sex object girlfriends, annoying wives, or coddling matriarchs. But “The Good Mothers”, a Disney+ series, apparently tells the story of mafia women without reducing them to stereotype. The series is based on the stories of Lea Garofalo, Giuseppina Pesce and Maria Concetta Cacciola, who rebelled against the mafia. On The Conversation, Felia Allum has a fascinating piece on the series and women in criminal organisations. She writes:

It’s incredibly difficult to research the roles women play in criminal groups because there is hardly any information available. When data does exist, it tends to adopt “a male gaze”. Most judicial or police sources are collected by men using their male values and gender assumptions, which colours the depiction of the women involved (and will inevitably pervade the narratives of those who use them).

When investigating mafias, there is a tendency to focus on the male-centric elements of operations – the leadership, the violence and the business. Accounts of women describe them either as victims of crime or as irrelevant extras.

If you want more, see this series from a few years ago by Deborah Bonello on women in Mexican cartels. She told Ms Magazine why she got into the subject:

I fell for the stereotype that women in criminal organizations tend to be the good faces of those groups—kind of the PR side. But as I investigated and traveled and asked questions I realized that women were, in some cases, as formidable and violent as their male counterparts, sometimes even more so. I also understood how—much like many of the strong women around me—women had much more agency than the existing narratives gave them credit for. They weren’t being forced into this realm: They wanted the status, power and success that organized crime promises—they were ambitious, ruthless and had a lot of endurance.

Thank you for reading. See you next week.