Gender equality

Gender equality is the condition in which people of all genders have equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. It includes equality in law and in social, economic, and political life.

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: A 1979 United Nations treaty requiring states to eliminate discrimination against women and promote equality. It makes gender equality a binding international commitment for states parties.
Gender discrimination: Unequal treatment or disadvantage based on gender, gender identity, or sex-related characteristics. Identifying discrimination reveals one direct barrier to equal rights and opportunity.
Olympe de Gouges: A French playwright and political activist who published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791. Her declaration directly challenged the exclusion of women from revolutionary rights.
Gender equity: Fairness in treatment and resource distribution that may require measures tailored to different needs or disadvantages. It emphasizes corrective fairness, while equality names equal rights and opportunities as the goal.
Women's suffrage: The movement to secure women's legal right to vote in political elections. Voting rights expanded women's formal access to political decision-making.
Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action: A 1995 global framework setting goals and actions for advancing women's rights and equality. Its twelve areas of concern translate equality goals into a broad policy agenda.
Gender pay gap: The difference between the average earnings of people of different genders in a population. It makes unequal economic outcomes visible while requiring analysis of their causes.
Mary Wollstonecraft: An English writer whose 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued for women's education and rational independence. Her case for equal education linked rights to women's intellectual development.
Formal equality: The principle that laws and rules should treat people alike without explicit distinctions between groups. Equal rules alone may leave entrenched disadvantages unchanged.
Equal pay for equal work: The principle that people performing the same work or work of equal value should receive equal pay. It applies equality directly to compensation and economic independence.

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