Women's Rights: A Global Trend Analysis

Background/Purpose: From the World Conference on Women in 1975, leading up to the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, a series of guidelines and protocols have been added to lay the groundwork to address women’s equality and rights (United Nations- UN, 2014). The continued objectification of women amplified by the “#MeToo Movement,” is the recent testament of how far we need to travel. A recent review conducted by the UN recognized that even where legal reforms had taken place, they were often ineffectively enforced (UN, 2014). Although a relative progress has been achieved,  the pace of progress to eliminate discriminatory practices, harmful customary traditions, and negative stereotyping against women is disturbingly slow. The objective of the study is to assess the trend in global women’s rights using human rights data from 1981 to 2011. We hypothesized that there will be a positive trend due to legal instruments in place for women’s rights.

Methods: Cingranelli-Richards [CIRI] Human Rights dataset (Cingranelli, Richards, & Clay, 2014) were used for the analyses. It is a standardized quantitative measure of human rights challenges from 202 countries. The final analysis included 194 countries categorized into 19 clusters based upon seven geographical regions and their Gross National Income per capita. CIRI uses three key indicators of women’s rights: economic, social, and political rights. The Krippendorf’s r-bar measure of inter-rater reliability for of the instrument is 0.944. Time series using panel data was used for the analysis. Fixed effects and random effects regression models were applied to calculate effects between regional and time periods. Stata v.13 was used for the analysis of the data.

 Results: The results indicated a positive trend in the overall economic gains across countries, and a moderate level change in the social rights, and a smaller effect change in political rights between the clusters. All the coefficients in the fixed model showed a good  model fit (F= 2, 3671, p < .001). Random effect regression model reported women’s political and economic rights as significant predictors of women’s social rights (Wald = 624.74, p< .001 ) explaining 11.9% of the variance between the countries. The independent effect of women’s economic rights had higher predictability (exp.B= 0.49, p=.0001) compared to women’s political rights (exp.B= 0.12, p=.01). Pasaran CD test showed a positive serial correlation within the women’s rights variables (r=0.40, p=.001).

Conclusions and Implications: The implications is that the global focus on policies that address reduction of poverty and gender mainstreaming is gaining some traction. However, on the social sphere of attitudes, political rights and cultural norms, results indicated smaller effect change and need for more concerted efforts. If women hold lesser power and are more vulnerable, they are less likely to have security and rights and more likely to be a victim of violence within their families and communities. This study calls on social work researchers, policy makers, and practitioners to research and advocate for sustained rights of women at the local, national, and regional level.