Opposing Forces: How, Why, and When Will Gender Inequality Disappear

What does the future hold for gender inequality? In the United States and many other countries, women's status has improved remarkably over the past two centuries. Will we continue to move ever closer to full gender equality? Or could gender relations stagnate where they are or even move backward? That gender remains a crucial aspect of social organization is not in question. In all too many parts of the world women are exposed to humiliations ranging from mockery to rape, from small rituals curtailing their freedom to absolute limitations in what they can do, what they can wear, whom they can marry, and where they can go. Gender is a ruling idea in people's lives—even where egalitarian ideology is common, as among young, affluent, educated Americans—that defines different expectations for behavior, dress, orientation to children, sexuality, and obligations to provide income. To pose meaningful questions about the possible declining significance of gender is not, therefore, to ask whether gender still matters or even how much it matters. Rather, we want to inquire how the implications of gender for social life have changed. In my work I have sought to show how and why gender inequality has declined over the past two centuries. Here I extend that analysis forward: If the past is a guide to the future, what can we reasonably expect will happen to gender inequality in the future? For millennia, women everywhere were subordinate to men under the most diverse economic, political, and cultural conditions. But in recent centuries, an extraordinary process has emerged, developed, and diffused across the world, eroding gender inequality, elevating women's status, and transforming modern society. If a young woman from the early nineteenth century could be whisked into our own time, she would surely be stunned by the improvements in women's status.