A new study has revealed the U.S. states where it is much harder to be a woman than a man.
Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have the greatest level of gender inequality, according to a new paper in PLoS ONE.
This was determined by a new tool that reveals that there is a large variation in attitudes regarding key gender issues like abortion, the #MeToo social movement, and party politics between U.S. states.
Gender inequality is usually scored based on a metric known as the Gender Inequality Index (GII), but researchers from New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates have developed this index into a new tool to compare equality across U.S. states.
"Gender inequality is a pervasive global problem that affects rich and poor countries alike. A 2019 Oxfam report showed that nearly two-thirds of the world's 781 million illiterate adults are women, a proportion that has remained largely unchanged for two decades. Moreover, 153 countries' legal systems still discriminate economically against women, including 18 in which husbands can legally prevent their wives from working," the researchers wrote in the paper.
"Gender inequality impacts numerous life domains, including health, labor-market participation, academia, and politics. Women are systematically more likely than men to be victims of sexual harassment, are paid consistently less than men, and are less likely to be hired than men, especially in historically-male professions," they said.
The original GII is a composite measure developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to determine gender disparities in a country.
Factors taken into account include the maternal mortality ratio (number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) and the adolescent birthrate (number of births per 1,000 women ages 15-19).
Other indicators include the percentage of parliamentary seats held by women, and the percentage of the population with at least a secondary education for both genders, among others. However, the GII in this study only looks at inequality at a countrywide level.
The new tool introduced in the paper adapts this index to compare individual U.S. states with one another.
They discovered that Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have the least equality between men and women, followed by Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Wyoming. The states with the best gender equality were Massachusetts, California, and Maine, followed by Connecticut, New Hampshire, Nevada, Minnesota, and Colorado.
These rankings were determined based on measures of women's wellness, such as feeling safe, life satisfaction, and financial well-being.
The researchers discovered that states with lower gender equality also had lower financial well-being for men, indicating that gender inequality is linked with poor economic growth overall. Additionally, politically right-leaning states had worse gender equality.
They also studied data from X—previously Twitter—and found that states with lower gender equality had fewer tweets in the #MeToo hashtag, indicating that greater inequality may result in lower levels of awareness and activism around #MeToo issues.
"Analysis of geo-localized messages on the Twitter social media platform reveals that higher GII-S scores were associated with fewer tweets containing the #MeToo hashtag," the researchers wrote in the paper.
"This finding suggests that the fight to gender inequality, as captured through the lens of the #MeToo movement, transcends economic disparities at the national level. It indicates that discussions surrounding feminism and women's rights, as highlighted by the #MeToo movement, are prevalent and resonate across states that vary in terms of economic inequality and prosperity."
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