A Glance at Women's Oppression
Oppression may be measured by assessing socio-structural conditions. Males oppress female human beings on the axis of sex, and this pattern has been recognized across several disciplines of scientific research.
One in three women globally experience physical or sexual violence.
More than 1 in 4 women (26%) aged 15 years and older have suffered violence at the hands of their partners at least once since the age of 15.
The vast majority of substantial research on violence against women in the United States is now 20+ years old :)
As high as 64 - 84% of cases of sexual violence go unreported, so these estimates are low.
A male perpetrator was reported in 98% of cases of violence against both men and women.
58% of all women murdered in 2017 were killed by an intimate partner or a family member (source. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2018).
80% of women are victims or survivors of corrosive violence - aka "acid attacks". 60% of these attacks go unreported, most instigators of acid attacks are male, and there has been a 90% increase in these attacks in the last 10 years, with the UK being the country with the highest rate of acid attacks.
Worldwide 1 in 5 girls are married off usually to men twice their age or more.
Globally, as many as 38% of murders of women are committed by a male intimate partner.
200 million women have experienced female genital mutilation/cutting.
71% of all human trafficking involves women and girls – mainly for sexual exploitation (source. UNODC, 2016).
The killing of women accused of sorcery/witchcraft is reported as a significant phenomenon in countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands.
Many women are killed specifically in "honor killings" - to defend the honor of a man.
200 million girls experience female genital mutilation.
National studies indicate indicate that as many as 4 million women are battered each year, but only about 48 percent of these cases are reported to the police.
Violence against women meets the requirements of widely accepted definitions of hate crimes, but crimes motivated by hatred of women are not included in most antibias crime legislation.
The disregard of pain and illness by medical professionals
This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this, but: women are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and discharged than men in the middle of having a heart attack. 70% of the people who experience chronic pain are female, but 80% of chronic pain studies have been conducted on males or male mice. Women also wait longer for a diagnosis and pain management than men.
Lack of research: the vast majority of scientific understanding and research on human beings conducted globally has been on males.
Period poverty and death due to misogynistic period shame (and I hope that this is obvious, but I am on Tumblr so I will emphasize that 100% of these deaths, illnesses, and disabilities are happening to female human beings.
Reproductive exploitation, discrimination, and control
Women across many countries have little to no access to abortions and other reproductive care, and are forced to carry their rapist's child.
Women are imprisoned for having abortions, and even people associated with helping them in any way to obtain an abortion experience legal consequences. Being impregnated through rape doesn't change this. In multiple states, rapists can sue their victims for parental custody. Women who are victims of stalkers and had children with them also are forced into allowing them visitation in the vast majority of cases.
Women also experience the brunt of forced sterilization and uniquely endure mortality rates from childbirth complications, in which often the infant's life is prioritized over the mother. Doctors may also refuse women and girls birth control, or subsequently deny women's requests to be sterilized.
Being forced to co-parent with their rapist.
Even if rape is proven, men can sue their victims for custody and may use children as a point of control over their victims and contact with their victims continuing psychological terror and causing trauma to children.
Over 3 million women experience pregnancies as a result of rape.
Men who donate sperm privately and through sperm banks experience no regulations and enforcement of how often they donate, resulting in some men producing thousands of offspring and others deceiving women on whose sperm they were impregnated with. Mothers of these children endure severe psychological trauma from this rape by deception in addition to themselves and their children navigating the psychological effects of avoiding potential incestuous relationships with the donor's other children.
In 38 countries, women can be fired for being pregnant.
From January 2017 through December 2019, 2.7 million workers age 20 and older were displaced from jobs they had held for at least 3 years; women accounted for 45 percent of those displaced.
While on leave, substantially fewer women than men
receive full pay (32 percent versus 55 percent), and more
receive no pay (41 percent versus 25 percent).
Women continue to experience occupational segregation in nontraditional jobs. In 2013, women composed 7.3 percent of all Craft Workers, while the participation rate for women in the Office and Clerical Worker category was considerably higher at 75.6 percent.
Despite the gains in employment made by women in the last 50 years, the annual median earnings of women working full time in 2013 was $39,157, compared with men at $50,033.
In 86 countries, women face some form of job restriction and 95 countries do not guarantee equal pay for equal work. 59 nations have no laws on the books addressing sexual harassment in the workplace, and 18 nations around the world allow husbands to legally prevent their wives from working.
Less than 15% of landholders worldwide are women, despite most women in the global south working in agriculture (source. Food and Agriculture Organization, 2015; World Bank, 2019).
Women make up just 25% of parliamentarians worldwide (source. Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2019).
Between 1990 and 2019 women made up 2% of mediators, 5% of witnesses and signatories, and 8% of negotiators in major peace processes worldwide (source. Council of Foreign Relations, 2019).
Only 1% of aid supporting gender equality went to women’s rights organisations in 2016-2017, despite governments around the world committing an extra $1bn to gender equality initiatives globally (sources. Guardian, 2019, OECD, 2019).
130 million girls are denied the right to an education.
According to the largest study on the portrayal, participation and representation of women in the news media spanning 20 years and 114 countries, only 24 per cent of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news are women.
A glass ceiling also exists for women news reporters in newspaper bylines and newscast reports, with 37 per cent of stories reported by women as of 2015, showing no change over the course of a decade.
An analysis of popular films across 11 countries found, for example, that 31 per cent of all speaking characters were women and that only 23 per cent featured a female protagonist—a number that closely mirrored the percentage of women filmmakers (21 per cent)
