Gender equality, also known as sex equality or sexual equality or equality of

the genders,implies that men and women should receive equal treatment, unless there is a sound
biological reason for different treatment.This concept is key in the United Nations' Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, where the ultimate aim is to provide equality in law and equality
in social situations, especially in democratic activities and securing equal pay for equal work.
The Equal Rights Amendment in the United States also aims to ensure gender equality.

History

The Shakers, a celibate evangelical group founded in America in 1774, practiced equality of the
sexes soon after they began organizing into their own separatist enclaves. The head of the
Shakers' central ministry in 1788, Joseph Meacham, had a revelation that the sexes should be
equal, so he brought Lucy Wright into the ministry as his female counterpart, and together they
restructured society to balance the rights of the sexes. Meacham and Wright established
leadership teams where each elder, who dealt with the men's spiritual welfare, was partnered
with an eldress, who did the same for women. Each deacon was partnered with a deaconess. Men
had the oversight of men; women had the oversight of women. Women lived with women; men
lived with men. In Shaker society, a woman did not have to be controlled or otherwise owned by
any man. After Meacham's death in 1796, Wright was the head of the Shaker ministry until her
own death in 1821. Going forward, Shakers maintained the same pattern of gender-balanced
leadership for more than 200 years.

They also promoted equality with women's rights advocates. In 1853, Shaker brother William
Leonard wrote that Shakerism brought an end to the “degradation and oppression of WOMAN,”
and suggested that the public discussion of woman’s rights, as well as other reforms, originated
with Shakers and was due to their recognition of God as both male and female. In 1859, Shaker
Elder Frederick Evans stated their beliefs forcefully, writing that Shakers were “the first to
disenthrall woman from the condition of vassalage to which all other religious systems (more or
less) consign her, and to secure to her those just and equal rights with man that, by her similarity
to him in organization and faculties, both God and nature would seem to demand." Evans and his
counterpart, Eldress Antoinette Doolittle, joined women's rights advocates on speakers' platforms
throughout the northeastern U.S. in the 1870s. A visitor to the Shakers wrote in 1875, “Each sex
works in its own appropriate sphere of action, there being a proper subordination, deference and
respect of the female to the male in his order, and of the male to the female in her
order [emphasis added], so that in any of these communities the zealous advocates of ‘women’s
rights’ may here find a practical realization of their ideal.”[2] The Shakers were more than a
radical religious sect on the fringes of American society; they put equality of the sexes into
practice. They showed that equality could be achieved and how to do it.[3]

In the wider society, the movement towards gender equality, especially in Western countries,
began with the suffragette movement of the late-19th century, which sought to allow women to
vote and hold elected office.

There have been substantial changes to women's property rights, particularly in relation to their
marital status. (See for example,Married Women's Property Act 1882.)

In the 1960s, a more general movement for gender equality developed based on women's
liberation and feminism. The central issue was that the rights of women should be the same
as men. continued to focus on specific issues.

Main article: Convention against Discrimination in Education

Changes to attitudes to equality in education opportunities for boys and girls have also
undergone a cultural shift.

Main article: Anti-discrimination laws

Over time, there have been significant changes in attitudes which have resulted in more
just legislation

Some changes came about by adopting affirmative action policies. The change has also involved
changes to social views, including "equal pay for equal work" as well as most occupations being
equally available to men and women, in many countries. For example, many countries now
permit women to serve in the armed forces, the police forces and to be fire fighters – occupations
traditionally reserved for men. Although these continue to be male dominated occupations an
increasing number of women are now increasingly active, especially in directive fields such as
politics and occupy high positions in business.

Similarly, men are increasingly working in occupations which in previous generations had been
considered Women's work, such asnursing, cleaning and child care. In domestic situations,
the biological differences between men and women in relation to activities related to child
bearing are more commonly shared where possible, and the role of child rearing is not as widely
considered to be an exclusively female role, so that a wife may be free to pursue her career after
marriage and following childbirth.

Another manifestation of the change in social attitudes is the non-automatic taking by a woman
of her husband's surname on marriageor combining names as in the Spanish naming customs.

Many people consider that the objective of gender equality has not been fully achieved,
especially in non-Western countries. A highly contentious issue relating to gender equality is the
role of women in religiously orientated societies. For example, the Cairo Declaration on Human
Rights in Islam declared that women have equal dignity, but not equal rights, and this was
accepted by many predominantly Muslim countries.

In some Christian churches the practice of churching of women may still have elements of Ritual
purification and theOrdination of women to the priesthood may be restricted or forbidden. Some
Christians or Muslims believe in Complementarianism, a view that holds that men and women
have different, but complementing roles. This view may be in opposition to the views and goals
of gender equality.

In addition, there are also non-Western countries of low religiosity where the contention
surrounding gender equality remains. In China,cultural preference for a male child has resulted
in a shortfall of women in the population. Feminism in Japan has made many strides and resulted
in in the Gender Equality Bureau, but Japan remains low in gender equality compared to other
industrialized nations.

Not all ideas for gender equality have been popularly adopted. For example:
despite Topfreedom the right to be bare breasted in public frequently applies only to males and
has remained a marginal issue. Breastfeeding in public is more commonly tolerated, especially in
semi-private places such as restaurants.[4]

However, this picture of Western progress with regards to gender equality can be seen as
severely oversimplified. Indeed, it is the contentious meaning of the term "equality" itself that
makes measuring gender equality "progress" inherently problematic. Newman and White suggest
that equality can be understood in three distinct ways: identical treatment, differential treatment,
and fair treatment.[5]Identical treatment is the claim that equality means the deployment of
generalizing, abstract, content-less reason, unaffected with regards to the gender it
addresses.[6] This view assumes that gender differences are entirely socially constructed
concepts, and that an underlying, gender-neutral human should be the target of equality. Next,
the differential treatment notion of equality is the claim that biological ("sex") differences do, in
fact, exist as tangible and real, and that structuring treatment around these differences is not
unequal, so long as these biological differences are accurately defined (that is to say, so long as
differential treatment is not random).[7]

The third view, that equality is fair treatment, is in a sense a reaction to both of the previous two
claims. Equality as identical treatment assumes that the criteria we use to define human nature is
itself objective, neutral, and fair for each human, and differential treatment assumes that there are
inherent, empirical, tangible, biological differences that the binary categories of male-female
derive from. Theorists like Judith Lorber, Michel Foucualt, Judith Butler, and many more attack
both of these essentialist stances, articulating that any claim to an underlying human nature is
absurd. In short, this is because what it is to be a human is at bottom a product of constructive
discursive discourses. As Judith Lorber puts the point: "the paradox of 'human nature' is that it is
always a manifestation of cultural meanings, social relationships, and power
politics".[8] Furthermore, theorists like Catharine MacKinnon claim that all circulating
articulations of this fictitious "universal human" actually reflect socially male biases.[9] That is to
say, unadulterated, objective, pure reason is merely a tacit disguise for patriarchal reinforcement.
It is clear, then, how the identical treatment model fails on this view. Similarly, by this logic, the
differential treatment is shown to merely use male rationality to define and construct the gender
difference - as a result, true equality is precluded.

This tacit inequality in our sexual concept poses a particular problem, because Western Liberal
Democracies are premised on descriptions of people that describe them as equal, yet this exists
alongside a description of women and men that describes them in terms that makes them
unequal. So the above claims of this article that "Non-Western" countries are less gender equal
than Western countries must not be so quickly accepted. Since this acceptance of inequality in
sexes is perceived as a natural difference between men and women, it thus permeates into society
relatively undiagnosed. Disguised as objective, the subjective/biased nature of these claims for
equal treatment become particularly difficult to address. This allows the state/laws to appear to
be gender-neutral and universally applicable, while ignoring the backdrop of the underlying
forces that have structured our legal system and personal cognition in such a way as to
promote equality of opportunity for social category male at the price of inequality for social
category female. As Judith Lorber says: "it is the taken-for-grantedness of such everyday
gendered behaviour that gives credence to the belief that the widespread differences in what
women and men do must come from biology".[10] On such a view, then, addressing equality must
take on more than formal equality, and become "fair treatment".[5] That is to say, the male
paradigm cannot be seen as natural and objective, thus bias and preference and affirmative action
to address past discriminations to women should be seen as furthering equality. Lorber describes
the "bathroom problem" to articulate the inequality of overarching, gender-neutral laws.[11] She
articulates how men's bathroom norms are used as the standard by which to determine how many
and how large public bathrooms should be. For various reasons, however, women make more
frequent use of the bathrooms than men, and as a result there are too few bathrooms for women,
and sufficient amount for men. ). This tacit structural underpinning of male dominance is
particularly dangerous for it creates the space for certain instances of female oppression to be
viewed and experienced as the woman’s choice. For instance, a woman might choose not to
pursue a job that isn’t compatible with her domestic obligations, while ignoring the structure of
the patriarchal family in assigning those domestic roles to her, and furthermore the structuring of
workplaces that tacitly stream out women that have this domestic duty in virtue of their strict
required hours or inflexibility with days off, etc. As such, the fair treatment model of equality
addresses the weaknesses of purely formal/de jure equality in addressing such tacit structural and
systematic inequality for women.

Efforts to fight inequality[edit source | editbeta]

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contain suggestions. (June 2013)

See also: Gender inequality

World bodies have defined gender equality in terms of human rights, especially women's rights,
and economic development.[12][13]UNICEF describes that gender equality "means that women
and men, and girls and boys, enjoy the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections. It
does not require that girls and boys, or women and men, be the same, or that they be treated
exactly alike."[14]

The United Nations Population Fund has declared that men and women have a right
to equality.[15] "Gender equity" is one of the goals of the United Nations Millennium Project, to
end world poverty by 2015; the project claims, "Every single Goal is directly related to women's
rights, and societies where women are not afforded equal rights as men can never achieve
development in a sustainablemanner."[13]

Thus, promoting gender equality is seen as an encouragement to greater economic

prosperity.[12] For example, nations of the Arab world that deny equality of opportunity to
women were warned in a 2008 United Nations-sponsored report that this disempowerment is a
critical factor crippling these nations' return to the first rank of global leaders in
commerce, learning and culture.[16]

In 2010, the European Union opened the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE)
in Vilnius, Lithuania to promote gender equality and to fight sex discrimination.

It is also worthy to note that gender equality is part of the national curriculum in Great Britain
and many other European countries.Personal, Social and Health Education, religious
studies and Language acquisition curricula tend to address gender equality issues as a very
serious topic for discussion and analysis of its effect in society