Giving Compass' Take:

• Research shows that despite the movement for gender equality growing in the 70s and 80s, the effort has slowed down significantly since the 90s. 

• How can donors play a role in prioritizing gender equality in employment and opportunities?

• Read more on how to make an impact on gender equality. 

Women have made progress in earning college degrees as well as in pay and in occupations once largely dominated by men since 1970—but the pace of gains in many areas linked to professional advancement has slowed in recent decades and stalled in others, finds the new five-decade analysis.

“Substantial progress has been made toward gender equality since 1970 on employment and earnings as well as in women’s access to certain fields of study and professions,” explains Paula England, a professor of sociology at New York University and the study’s senior author. “However, movement toward gender equality has slowed down, and in some cases, stalled completely.”

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Early changes were like picking the low-hanging fruit—the most obvious barriers came down and plenty of women jumped at the new opportunities,” notes England. “Further progress will require deeper cultural and institutional change.”

The analysis examined data for the years 1970 through 2018 from the US government’s Current Population Surveys and American Community Surveys, as well as from the National Center for Education Statistics. Among the NYU research team’s findings were the following:

  • Women’s employment (women aged 25 to 54) rose steadily from 1970 to 2000, moving from 48% employed in 1970 to 75% employed in 2000. In subsequent years, it declined, plateaued, and then declined more in the Great Recession (2008-2010), reaching a bottom of 69%, before rebounding to 73% in 2018.
  • Men’s median hourly earnings (in constant 2018 dollars) were approximately $27-28/hour in the 1970s, then fell to below $23/hour by the mid-1990s. Since then, the median went up in the late 1990s, declined during the Great Recession, and rebounded some since. But it has always been between $22 and $25/hour since the mid-1990s.During this same period (1970-2017), women’s median earnings have always been lower than men’s. In the 1970s, they were stable at about $17/hour. They began to rise in the early 1980s and continued to do so for the rest of the decade; median earnings also rose in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, they have been fairly flat at about $20/hour.

Read the full article about gender equality by James Devitt at Futurity.