Map reveals worst US states for gender equality

A new study has revealed the US 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 published in PLoS ONE.

That’s according to a new tool that reveals there is wide variation in attitudes about key gender issues like abortion, the #MeToo social movement and party politics across U.S. states.

Gender inequality is typically measured using a measure known as the Gender Inequality Index (GII), but researchers at New York University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, have developed the index into a new tool for comparing 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 virtually unchanged for two decades. In addition, the legal systems of 153 countries continue to economically discriminate against women, including 18 in which husbands can legally prevent their wives from working,” the researchers wrote in the study.

“Gender inequality impacts many areas of life, including health, labor force participation, academia, and politics. Women are consistently more likely than men to experience sexual harassment, are consistently paid less than men, and are less likely to be hired than men, particularly in traditionally male-dominated professions,” they said.

The original IGI is a composite measure developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to determine gender disparities within a country.

Factors considered include maternal mortality rate (number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) and adolescent birth rate (number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 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 sexes, among others. However, the GII index in this study only takes into account inequality at the national level.

The new tool presented in the paper adapts this index to compare different US states with each other.

They found that Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma are the states with the lowest gender equality, followed by Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming. The states with the highest gender equality are Massachusetts, California and Maine, followed by Connecticut, New Hampshire, Nevada, Minnesota and Colorado.

These rankings were determined based on measures of women’s well-being, such as feelings of security, life satisfaction and financial well-being.

The researchers found that states with lower gender equality also had lower financial well-being for men, indicating that gender inequality is linked to lower overall economic growth. Additionally, politically right-leaning states had lower gender equality.

They also studied data from X (formerly Twitter) and found that states with lower gender equality had fewer tweets with the #MeToo hashtag, indicating that greater inequality may lead to lower levels of awareness and activism around #MeToo issues.

“Analysis of geotagged posts on the social media platform Twitter reveals that higher GII-S scores were associated with fewer tweets containing the #MeToo hashtag,” the researchers write in the study.

“This finding suggests that addressing gender inequality, as captured by the #MeToo movement, transcends economic disparities at the national level. It indicates that discussions around feminism and women’s rights, as highlighted by the #MeToo movement, are widespread and resonate across states that vary in terms of economic inequality and prosperity.”

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