As soul legend James Brown sang in 1966, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” While many U.S. states now treat the sexes more equally, some remain plagued by inequality.
A new study has found that Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma are the toughest places to live as a woman of all the US states, while Massachusetts, California and Maine are the easiest.
That’s the finding of scientists who developed a measurement system that looks at statistics on teen pregnancy, deaths during pregnancy, percentages of women in political office, local polls on safety, financial well-being and more to assess gender equality and inequality at the state level.
The researchers’ state-by-state rankings, which were based on statistics currently used by the United Nations, also revealed a potentially instructive trend.
They also discovered that states with lower equality for women also had lower financial well-being for men.
‘Gender inequality is negatively related to economic growth,’ the researchers write in their new study. ‘It leads to less financial well-being for all members of society.’
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Scientists found that Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma are the toughest places to live as a woman of all the states in America – with Massachusetts, California and Maine coming out on top. Above, a homeless woman sits on a curb in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on July 9, 2024
Amid other top ranked statesConnecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado all scored high on gender equality and greater well-being.
And above the bottom three were the states of Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming, with the least equal treatment of men and women of all U.S. states.
The UN version of the measure that inspired this research, known as the Gender Inequality Index (GII), includes data such as the maternal mortality ratio, which records the number of pregnant women who die per 100,000 live births.
The ‘adolescent birth number’, or the number of births per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 19, is also included. This is often used by social scientists as a yardstick for access to good quality education and more adequate protection against sexual abuse.
The GII also takes into account the percentage of women in public office and the percentage of men and women with at least a high school education, among other factors, as detailed in the researchers’ new study published Wednesday in the journal. PLoS ONE.
But the researchers – psychologists from the University of Padua in Italy and New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates – built on the UN index and adapted it with specific US data for their own state-by-state assessments.
The team collected survey data from the American polling organization Gallup, US Dailies.
Using Gallup’s US Dailies, the team was able to map public opinion on women’s financial well-being, health and subjective perceptions of safety in their living environments, state by state.
Typical survey questions included: “Do you have any health problems that prevent you from doing things that people your age can normally do?” and whether you: respondents rank their agreement with the sentence ‘You always feel safe and secure.’
The US-centric version of the GII scores created with these more localized data ranged from 0.16 for Massachusetts, on the more equal end, to 0.36 for Louisiana, on the more equal end. The full range of the GII is from 0.00 to 1.00.
For comparison: the UN Country-by-Country GII placed a notoriously unequal country like Afghanistan at 0.69 and a more equal country like Sweden at 0.036 for data from the same year, 2016.
The researchers’ state rankings also revealed a potentially instructive trend: States with low equality for women also had low financial well-being for men. “Gender inequality is negatively associated with economic growth,” they wrote. Above, a man and woman in Maine enjoy a walk
The researchers noted that their economic findings made clear “the need to address gender inequality not only as a matter of social justice, but also as a way to improve the overall well-being of women in particular, but also of men.”
“A lack of employment opportunities for women,” they wrote, “also places a burden on male breadwinners, who also face the added stress of supporting a family without the benefit of their partner’s income.”
These financial scenarios also presented physical risks for women, based on their adjusted GII tables.
“In contexts with high gender inequality, women are often economically dependent on men and therefore have less control over their own lives,” they concluded in the study.
‘This can make them more vulnerable to domestic violence or abuse.’
After the worst offenders — Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma — Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming were found to have the least equal treatment of men and women of all U.S. states (above, a static version of the interactive map)
The team stressed the need for more political action in this area, adding that ‘the legal systems of 153 countries still discriminate economically against women, including 18 countries where husbands can legally ban their wives from working’
The researchers also conducted a second study, comparing their adjusted GII figures for each state based on the number of tweets (now X messages) about various burning issues, including abortion and the #MeToo movement.
“Analysis of geolocated posts on the social media platform Twitter shows that higher GII-S scores are associated with fewer tweets containing the hashtag #MeToo,” the researchers said.
The team also noted that states with a political right-wing slant showed worse gender equality, according to their statistics.
“Gender inequality is a pervasive global problem that affects rich and poor countries alike. A 2019 Oxfam report found that nearly two-thirds of the world’s 781 million illiterate adults are women,” they noted, “a ratio that has remained largely unchanged for two decades.”
The team stressed the need for more political action on this issue, adding that ‘the legal systems of 153 countries still discriminate economically against women, including 18 countries where husbands can legally ban their wives from working.’