Gender equality

Gender equality, also known as sex equality, gender egalitarianism, sexual equality or equality of the genders, is the view that both men and women should receive equal treatment and not be discriminated against based on their gender. This is the objective of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which seeks to create equality in law and in social situations, such as in democratic activities and securing equal pay for equal work. The related topic of rights is treated in two separate articles, Men's rights and Women's rights. In practice, the objective of gender equality is for people to acquire, if they so choose, equal treatment throughout a society, not just in politics, the workplace, or any other policy-designated sphere.

History

An early advocate for gender equality was Christine de Pizan, who in her 1405 book The Book of the City of Ladies wrote that the oppression of women is founded on irrational prejudice, pointing out numerous advances in society probably created by women.

Gender

Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.

Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO). However, in many other contexts, including some areas of social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it. Although this change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed in 1993 when the USA's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to use gender instead of sex. In 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation." In non-human animal research, gender is also commonly used to refer to the physiology of the animals.

Equality

Equality may refer to:

Social

Politics

Mathematics

Places

See also