Gender norms and stereotypes: a survey of concepts, research and issues about change

Since the first World Conference on Women in 1975 that ultimately led to the Beijing Declaration of 1995, there have been important gains for women and girls around the world. There have been advances in literacy, formal education, life expectancy, workforce participation, and access to some professions. These decades have also seen new forms of misogyny, continued domestic violence, unabated rape, casualization of women’s labour, and reassertions of masculine authority. Women are now more visible in politics, though distinctly a minority in policymaking levels of government. Women are still almost completely excluded from the top levels of transnational corporate management, religious authority, control of technoscience and military power. In thinking about the norms and stereotypes that influence gender outcomes, therefore, we are dealing with a complex terrain and turbulent processes of change. Careful thinking and examination of evidence are necessary. After noting the major policy documents that have raised issues about norms, this paper discusses the leading concepts in this field. It then considers evidence about how norms and stereotypes are materialized in everyday life, in five specific areas: media, education, employment, agriculture and public life. It then turns to evidence and analysis about how gender norms and stereotypes get reproduced or sustained by social processes. Finally it turns to the question of how gender norms and images change, and implications for strategies of change. The paper ends with an appendix on problems of method in studying gender norms transnationally.This report was commisioned by UN Wome