Man Enough? Measuring Masculine Norms to Promote Women’s Empowerment
Masculinities can either support or hinder women’s empowerment and greater gender equality. However, a lack of consistent and comparable data hinders efforts to understand and assess harmful, restrictive masculinities. This report identifies and describes ten norms of restrictive masculinities to be urgently addressed within the political, economic and private spheres. Alongside these norms the report highlights gender-equitable alternatives, which support women’s empowerment in practice. By mapping available and ideal indicators, the report provides a roadmap for efforts to measure changing norms of masculinities. In doing so, this report aims to support policies to transform masculinities by facilitating the creation of more and better data on masculine norms.
Preface
For the last decade, the OECD Development Centre’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) has supported countries in understanding the often invisible barriers to women and girls’ empowerment by measuring the levels of discrimination in social institutions. While the gender equality discourse has predominantly focused on discrimination against women and girls, it is increasingly clear that men and boys need to be engaged in achieving gender equality. The issue thus becomes: how can men and boys be included in advancing important goals such as promoting women’s participation in the labour market, equally redistributing domestic and care work among household members, ensuring women’s political representation and eradicating violence against women? This in turn requires challenging unequal gender power dynamics which are built on codified relations between men and women and on what it means to “be a ‘real’ man’’. In other words, we need to reassess and rethink the ways in which masculinities can be supportive of greater equality, in the context of the Agenda 2030 on sustainable development
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