25% people in 80 countries think husband beating wife justifiable: Shocking UN report

Despite the rise of women’s rights groups and social movements over the past decade, progress towards gender equality in the world remained stagnated, a report by the United Nations showed. It noted that nearly 90 per cent of both men and women or almost nine out of 10 men and women worldwide hold “at least one” fundamental bias against women. A woman jogs with a dog along the Hudson River shortly after sunrise, as haze and smoke caused by wildfires in Canada.(Reuters)

The report was released by UN Development Programme and is called the Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) report which is focussed on looking at the progress women rights and issues have made in the past ten years. Among both men and women, “biased gender social norms are prevalent worldwide: almost 90% of people have at least one bias” of the seven biases analysed, the report said.

The report noted that prejudices remain “deeply embedded” in society along with cultural bias and pressures that hinder women’s empowerment. These prejudices “are widespread among men and women suggesting that these biases are deeply embedded and influences both men and women to similar degrees,” the report said.

Using data from the international research programme World Values Survey (WVS) collected between 2010-2014 and 2017–2022 from 80 countries and territories accounting for at least 85 per cent of the global population, the index shoed “no improvement in biases against women in a decade despite powerful global and local campaigns for women’s rights."

More than half of the world’s population- 69 per cent- believes that men make “better” political leaders as opposed to women while more than 40 per cent of people reportedly believe that men are better business executives than women, the report noted, adding, that only 27 per cent of people believe that women having the same rights as men is essential for a democracy while, 25 per cent of people believe that a man beating his wife is justifiable.

Some 28 per cent believe that university education is more important for men than women while the head of the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office, Pedro Conceicao said, “Social norms that impair women’s rights are detrimental to society more broadly, dampening the expansion of human development. Lack of progress on gender social norms is unfolding against a human development crisis.”