Evolving patterns of gender inequality over time and across countries

Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, Michele J. Gelfand and Johannes Kleinhempel

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The last century has seen significant gains in women’s agency and status, declining gender gaps in labor force participation, education, and wages, and ‘a rising tide’ of increasingly gender egalitarian societies. Many expected this process to continue. Yet, unexpectedly, progress towards gender equality has started to stall in many countries. We can even observe a clear backlash against gender equality in some countries. The optimistic predictions of gender convergence as suggested by modernization theory have not materialized. Moreover, counterintuitively, the most gender egalitarian societies (e.g., Denmark and Sweden) have the highest level of gender segregation in jobs and educational fields, a phenomenon also known as the gender-equality paradox. In these countries, women are less likely to major in STEM and more likely to major in the humanities, with generally important consequences for the gender gap in wages. These observations matter for the field of international business (IB), which has studied cross-country differences in gender equality and the implications for management practices across the world. Our theories in IB cannot explain the gender-equality paradox or the backlash against gender equality observed across countries. The good news is that new theorizing is emerging in sociology and political science, with tremendous opportunities for IB. The purpose of our editorial is to describe how these insights can propel IB research, and to chart an exciting way forward.

Keywords: Gender equality; gender inequality; international business; comparative country studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/126842/1/MPRA_paper_126842.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:126842

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().