- Here I am, with a simple cup of coffee,
getting ready to talk to you about gender equality.
I do really love my coffee.
But this cup, it's only 84% full.
And the guy behind me,
his cup is completely full to the brim.
It doesn't make sense
because we've both paid the same amount,
and yet I get 16% less delicious coffee than he does?
Does that seem fair?
OK, all of this might be a little clunky,
but the truth at the heart of the matter
is deeply concerning.
Women just don't get a fair shake
when it comes to our time or money.
I'm talking about what's referred to as the gender pay gap.
And in 2019, it widened in nearly half
of all U.K. companies.
And that's just here. Globally, things are getting worse.
In South Korea, women are paid 34% less than men on average.
Japan, also not good.
Women make 24% less on average.
And in Brazil, 20% less.
So, how far away are we from gender equality?
- A long time.
- Five years, it's enough.
- Hopefully less than 10, but realistically, 20.
- I don't think we're ever going to get there.
- Recent studies show that we're
over a century away from reaching this goal.
The thing is, there's substantial proof
that when gender equality increases,
everyone is better off.
When equality between genders goes up,
so does overall life satisfaction
for men, women and children.
Businesses perform better.
And GDP goes up, and societies are more peaceful.
So, why are we so far from reaching this goal?
All over the globe, men make more than women
for the same jobs.
Even in the U.S., where laws
such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 exist,
women earn less than men at every stage of their career
regardless of their level of education.
Things get more dire
when you factor in race and class backgrounds.
For every dollar earned by a white man,
Asian women earn 85 cents and white women earn 77 cents.
The number is even lower for black women, who earn 61 cents,
Native American women, who earn 58 cents,
and Latina women, who earn 53 cents to every dollar.
The money trail and the very unequal outcomes
point us to something pervasive and hard to budge.
I'm talking about the way that
political systems are built upon,
and the way they reproduce deep biases about gender.
And this includes reinforcing a strong gender binary.
You know, men are assertive and dominant.
Women are weak and emotional, and so on.
These assumptions not only limit women,
but also block men from expressing
the full range of human emotion.
And that also means that trans people,
or those who are non-binary,
face additional heaps of discrimination.
OK, let's look at how these biases
limit a person across a life span.
Inequality starts very early on.
In some cases, before birth.
In India, statistics show that there are 63 million
fewer women than there should be
due to female infanticide, selective abortions
and boys being better fed and cared for.
When it comes to schooling,
globally, girls are far more likely
to be pulled out of school earlier than boys.
Around the world, 132 million girls are out of school.
When they are in school, they're often harassed,
marginalized and discouraged from certain fields.
And when it's time to get a job,
more obstacles slow women down.
Women in most countries expect less pay
from their first job than men.
This widens wage gaps from the get go.
And as women get older, it only gets worse.
Well honestly, for women, you're damned if you do
and you are damned if you don't.
Men who negotiate aggressively are seen as powerful
and women who do so as pushy.
And the women are often penalized.
So for women, sometimes it's self-preservation
to accept less than they deserve.
Plus, at home, women bear an enormous amount
of unpaid, undervalued labor.
Often running the household,
disproportionately taking care of children,
doing chores and keeping the family calendar
all whilst being paid less than their male colleagues.
Does that affect a woman's performance at work?
You bet it does.
Now, performance at work might sound really trivial
when you consider some of the challenges women face
just to survive.
Rape, intimate partner abuse, even death from childbirth.
They occur in terrifyingly high numbers
all around the world.
So, are we surprised that their health,
their happiness, their ability to contribute economically,
they're all seriously hindered.
We know that instituting better laws are a good first step.
But, surprise, we also don't have nearly enough
women in power anywhere.
Political power is an arena
where men have the most advantage over women.
The truth is equality is a pretty simple concept.
But achieving it, that's really complicated.
As it stands, only a handful of countries
are even near closing the gender gap.
Hint: Iceland's looking pretty good.
We need a deeper examination
of the intersecting systems of oppression
that reinforce inequality.
We need more girls in school.
We need more access to opportunities
and better ones for women to enter the workforce.
We need to fairly share the unpaid labor
and childcare at home.
We need more women leaders.
And we need better laws.
Liberating us from inequality
means reconsidering all of this.
It's a tall order, but an urgent one.
Unless we want to wait 100 years or more
for a better, more equal world.