Gender Inequality and Social Media: A Research Brief

How else does social media and gender equality affect other issues in the world?

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Currently, women and girls are often not receiving the necessary health education that women and girls from developed countries currently benefit.  The more that we can reduce the “walls” that are stopping women from receiving healthcare, the more they will be able to contribute to equal health for all women.

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The gender inequalities do not stop at healthcare: they bleed into education.  According to the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation and McGeough et. al. (2018), “Two-thirds of illiterate people [or people who cannot read] are women” (p. 56).  As a result, when women are not able to read, they lose out on available opportunities for jobs, to know more about how to request the best health care they can receive, and therefore have access to information to make the best decisions for their bodies.  As former Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, mentioned, helping girls and women in general stay in school benefits our political, social, economic, and world society as a whole by offering new perspectives, adding additional work opportunities, and new insights into a world hungry for change.

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Considering that women are often required to take care of family businesses before earning their education, many are often sent to work in agriculture, or the job area of working as a farmer or outdoors in food production.  Even though “women comprise the largest percentage of the agricultural workforce… they often do not have control over land… and resources” (McGeough et. al., 2018, p. 56).  When women do not have control over such resources, though they are the majority of those working, they see what needs fixing the most on farms, in land and food production, and other agriculture-related parts of the job.  As a result, if a women’s voice is not heard, the agriculture company is losing a very important, knowledgeable voice, because those voices are closest to the farms.  By not listening to women and giving them control over land and production resources, we lose out on the opportunity to profit and make the agricultural business more successful than when it started.

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Related to agricultural concerns is the percentage of climate change, or weather-related patterns that are affected by carbon and fossil fuel emissions, disasters that affect women farmers in the Southern regions of the world.  Climate-change related natural events, such as floods or even droughts, can affect women in the South of the world, and therefore continue to increase the insecurities women face in making money through farming.  When women are not able to make money and a livelihood because they are not in positions to own and control their land and farm-related resources, natural disasters threaten to continue to hurt women’s ability to be independent and be equal to men.