Gender Inequality

The capitalist economic system relies on patriarchy to ensure a cheap supply of labour.¹  Under patriarchy, capitalists are able to pay women less money for the same amount of work as their male counterparts. Furthermore, women tend to perform the majority of the household care labour that is essential to a functioning society, and which sustains the industrial workforce, yet they are not compensated for their time, effort and skill. Their labour contributes to the collective output and yet they do not get any claim on that output in return. This represents a massive ‘free gift’ to the capitalist economy, which enables capital accumulation.

As a result of these dynamics, women’s share of global labour income today stands at only around 30%, having barely increased since 1990.  With existing trends, it will take more than 500 years to achieve gender parity at the global level. The struggle for gender equality remains an urgent priority, and it will require building a post-capitalist economy that values and properly remunerates women’s labour.

Women’s labour share tends to be lowest in the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world economy. This is because the periphery suffers a net-outflow of embodied labour to the core economies, which is maintained through efforts by imperialist powers and local comprador elites to force down wages in the global South (see our entry on Drain from the Global South). Feminist historians such as Sylvia Federici and Maria Mies emphasise that these efforts have disproportionately targeted female workers, by mobilizing ideologies of patriarchy and sexism to deny women full rights.

Countries with strong public provisioning systems tend to have the highest gender parity. In the global North, the social democratic countries, such as Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, tend to be the most gender egalitarian. In the periphery and semi-periphery, the former socialist bloc has historically had the highest level of gender parity. The socialist bloc has even outperformed the United States, most of Western Europe, and Australia - core economies that benefit from an imperial advantage in the world-system. This is because public job guarantees allowed women to easily access paid employment in the formal sector, and social programs like free child care and paid parental leave reduced the burden of unpaid care work, while mass education campaigns and egalitarian wage-setting practices narrowed the gender pay gap.

It is worth noting, however, that the social democratic and socialist countries have seen a slowing of progress since the 1990s, during the period of market reform. In the case of China, progress reversed during the period of economic liberalization.²

Still, the Former Eastern Bloc - and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (individual countries are visible via the dropdown menu) - continue to outperform the core regions in terms of gender income parity. Within the core, the social democratic countries of Scandinavia remain far ahead of the rest. This illustrates the power of public planning in terms of reducing gender inequality.

In most countries, women are paid less than men per hour of paid work. Research from Australia - where the average hourly wage of women is 6.5% less than men - indicates that the largest single contributor to this inequality is pure gender discrimination. In other words, women receive less pay even when performing exactly the same work at exactly the same career stage.

However, feminist economists emphasise that other causes of the gender gap must also be understood as discriminatory.

For instance, a significant driver of the pay gap is gender norms and expectations that compel women to carry a greater burden of unpaid care work, meaning they cannot devote as much time and energy to advancing their careers in the paid workforce.

Another issue is industrial and occupational segregation, where women are disproportionately employed in jobs that pay lower wages. Scholars point out that this occurs because certain jobs - such as nursing, teaching, care work, etc. - are socially constructed as 'feminine,' and then devalued and underpaid on that basis, despite being essential and highly skilled forms of labour.³

This graph breaks down the main drivers of the gender wage gap for Australia. These findings are consistent with studies from other countries.⁴

On average, women work more than men. They perform more than half of the labour that keeps the world running. This pattern holds true in every region. And yet, most of women's working time (60%) is unpaid, compared to only 21% for men. And of all the unpaid care labour that is performed in the world, women do most of it: on average 3x more than men.

Unpaid care labour provides a crucial inputs to national production, and yet the people who perform it receive no independent claim on the collective output of goods and services on the market.

 

Unpaid care labour represents a huge subsidy to the capitalist world-economy. This labour reproduces the waged workers who produce capitalist commodities, ensuring that they are fed, healthy, educated, and capable of showing up to work. If capitalists had to pay for these essential services, it would eat into their profit margins and bring capital accumulation to a halt.

Research represented in this graph shows that if unpaid care work was remunerated as a similar rate to labour in the paid economy, the total monetary cost would be equivalent to between 12% and 63% of GDP, depending on the country.

Taken together, this chart and the charts above indicate that there is a hidden transfer of value from women to men, and from unpaid carers to firms and consumers.

We can see a similar pattern playing out at the level of global commodity chains. Household labour in the global South makes a major contribution to the production that yields the goods and services we all enjoy. And yet it is unpaid. 

The market price of a pound of Brazilian arabica coffee is about $7. Of that, $2.45 goes to the Brazilian producers and transporters, while a much larger $4.55 is captured by roasters and retailers in the global North. But the coffee also embodies an enormous quantity of household labour performed in Brazil, which supports the paid workers by providing care services and assistance with farming. This labour would be worth $15.05 if paid at the wage of a US farmworker. And yet the people who perform this labour receive nothing from the sale of the coffee.  

Users can toggle the chart to see a similar analysis of Apple's iPad. These studies reveal that there is a hidden transfer of value from unpaid household labour in the global South to firms and consumers in the imperial core.

 

Wages and labour disparities are not the only expression of gender inequality. This graph shows the Global Gender Gap Index, which incorporates inequalities in health, education, economic participation and political empowerment. By this metric, it will take 125 years to close the gender gap if existing trends continue. Toggling the graph shows the Gender Gap Index by region.  While all regions have made progress since 2006, it is universally slow, and in some cases performance has stagnated or even declined over the past decade.

To overcome this impasse, it is imperative to build a post-capitalist system based on radical democratic institutions that give women an equal share in political and economic power. In the Kurdish regions of Northeast Syria, socialist revolutionaries led by the Kurdistan Workers Party are building a democratic system where political and economic decisions are made by mass-based organizations and popular councils in which at least 40% of positions are reserved for women.⁵ We must find ways to scale similar arrangements up to the global level.

Key policies include a public job guarantee to ensure equal access to paid employment, universal public childcare, and ‘balanced job networks’ to ensure that the most fulfilling and desirable work is shared equally between men and women. Care work must be valued and properly remunerated, including through cash transfers to carers and through the public provisioning of services traditionally provided in the household, such as child and elder care, disability support, household cleaning, and even cooking services, which can be provided through community kitchens and public restaurants.⁶ Public wage-setting regulations can also be used to establish more egalitarian pay scales, and to ensure industries that have been socially constructed as ‘feminine’ are not underpaid relative to those that have been constructed as ‘masculine.’

Notes

Suggested citation: Sullivan, D., Hickel, J., & Zoomkawala, H. (2025). “Gender inequality”, Global Inequality Project. Accessed at: https://globalinequality.org/gender-inequality

1. For essential reading on capitalism and gender inequality, see: Federici (2004), Mies (1986), Dunaway (2014). 

2. Blau & Kahn (2016: 48) also point to a widening of the gender pay gap with the fall of Communism in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, which they attribute to the increased role of market forces in setting wages. The economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (1989) also point out that in China the dismantling of collective institutions and rural social services jeopardised women’s access to formal paid employment and appear to have been associated with a reduction in gender equality. Indeed, during the first half of the 1980s, China’s female infant mortality rate almost doubled (from 37.7 to 67.2 per thousand). As Drèze and Sen explain, “there is considerable evidence that the involvement of women in so-called ‘gainful employment’ tends to reduce gender bias against females. In this respect, the communal form of agriculture used in pre-reform China provided much easier scope for female ‘gainful’ employment, and the proportion of women in such employment has risen quite radically in the 1960s and 1970s. However, with the new [market-based] responsibility system, Chinese agricultural production has become more family-based, with the usual division of labour that tends to place women in activities of the typical ‘household’ kind. This can indeed be an influence towards worsening the position of women in ‘cooperative conflicts,’ and through a general regression of women’s economic position and social status, can also strengthen the anti-female bias in the caring of children… Also, the burden of decreased health services seems to have been unequally shared between boys and girls, and given the pre-existing anti-female bias (whether strengthened or not in the post-reform period), the gender inequalities can be expected to be most consequential in periods of general contraction" (Drèze & Sen 1989: 215-221).

3. Bradley (1989), Waring (1999), Cortis & Meagher (2012).

4. Blau & Kahn (2016) analyse the gender gap in annual earnings of full-time workers In the United States. They find that 38% of the gap cannot be explained by differences in job type and labour market variables. This ‘unexplained gap’ clearly reflects pure discrimination. Other substantial contributors to the gap include occupational differences (32.9%), industrial segregation (17.6%), and differences in labour market experience (14.1%).

5. Knapp, Flach & Ayboga (2016).

6. On proposals for monetary payments, see: Federici (1975), Sekulova & D'Alisa (2024). For public and cooperative provisioning systems, see: Davis (1981: ch. 13), Coote & Percy (2020). For a recent book that advocates for both approaches, see: Kallis et al. (2020).