feminine feminism in numbers

Who run the world? You, me and Béyonce have known the answer to that question for a very long time: girls. But has the rest of the world caught up yet? When we look at the state of women’s rights, we see a mixed bag of victories and setbacks, we see a whole lot of discrepancies. Girls get better grades than boys, but get paid less once they graduate. Women play the leads in Hollywood movies and Netflix series, but are still underrepresented in world politics. These numbers and percentages show: we’ve come a long way, but still have far to go. But they also show this: no matter what you throw at a woman, she will rise. I believe that 100%.

• 202: The number of years it will take for the global gender pay gap to even out.
• 10 trillion: The estimated value in dollars of unpaid work performed by women every year, across the world. Twice as much as men do!
• 63%: The percentage that women make compared to what men earn worldwide.
• 1 in 3: The average of women worldwide (35%!) that have experienced physical or sexual violence, mostly by an intimate partner.
• 19 million: The times that the hashtag #MeToo has been used on twitter since actress Alyssa Milano’s first viral call to arms.
• 0: The number of countries in the world where women were given equal rights with men in 2009.
• 6: The number of countries in the world where women are given equal rights with men now. (Kudos to France, Sweden, Luxembourg, Latvia, Denmark and Belgium!)
• 0: The number of women featuring in the BBC’s 20th Century Icon shortlist.
• 2 to 1: The ratio with which women outnumber men at the University of Jordan (where female students also earn higher grades in math, engineering and a range of other subjects than male students).
• 40%: The percentage of top-grossing films featuring a female in the leading or co-leading role in 2018. (A whopping 20% increase from 2007)