Overview
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n recent decades, women across the globe have made positive strides toward gender equality. Literacy rates for young women and girls are higher than ever before, while gender gaps in primary education have closed in almost all countries. In the last three decades, over half a billion women have joined the world’s labor force (World Bank 2011c). Progress toward gender equality in East Asia and the Pacific has been similarly noteworthy. Most countries in the region have either reached or surpassed gender parity in education enrollments. Health outcomes for both women and men have improved significantly. Female labor force participation rates in the region are relatively high. Yet, despite considerable progress in this economically dynamic region, gender disparities persist in a number of important areas—particularly in access to economic opportunity and in voice and influence in society. For policy makers in East Asian and Pacific countries, closing these gender gaps represents an important challenge to achieving more inclusive and effective development. The East Asia and Pacific Region’s significant economic growth, structural transformation, and poverty reduction in the last few
decades have been associated with reduced gender inequalities in several dimensions. The region grew at 7 percent on average between 2000 and 2008 (figure O.1), the structure of the region’s economies has shifted away from agriculture toward manufacturing and services, and extreme poverty has fallen dramatically. Indeed, the share of the region’s population living on less than US$1.25 a day has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990—from among the highest rates of poverty in the world to among the lowest (figure O.2). Growth, structural transformation, and poverty reduction have been accompanied by considerable progress toward gender equality in several key areas, particularly education and health. Many countries in the region have experienced closing gender gaps in school enrollments and declining maternal and child mortality rates. But growth and development have not been enough to attain gender equality in all its dimensions. Women still have less access than men to a range of productive assets and services, including land, financial capital, agricultural extension services, and new information technologies. Substantial employment segregation by gender remains. Women are less likely than men to work in
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