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This month, the people of Ireland did something shocking. They voted overwhelmingly not to promote gender equality.
On March 8, International Women's Day, a whopping 73.9 percent voted against changing part of the country's 87-year-old constitution, which in effect states that a woman's place is in the home.
The offending section declares: “The State recognizes that women, through their lives within the home, provide the State with support without which the public good cannot be achieved.
“Therefore, the state seeks to ensure that mothers are not forced, by economic necessity, to work, which leads to the neglect of their duties at home.”
Voters were asked to repeal this long-standing gag and approve a new provision stating that the state aims to support caregiving “by family members to each other.” But voters did no such thing.
A plethora of explanations have been offered for the largest 'no' vote in Irish referendum history. There were concerns that this change would reinforce the idea that care is a private, unpaid family responsibility with no guarantee of state support. The modification was difficult to explain. The “Yes” campaign was mixed.
More than two-thirds of voters (67.7%) also rejected a separate amendment that would have recognized that families are built on “lasting relationships,” not just marriage.
But the vote on “women's duties at home” was still a shock, especially since this is Ireland. The country scores well in European gender equality rankings, and more than 60% of its voters approved legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015 and repealing the ban on abortions in 2018.
Importantly, this is not the only sign that the path toward women's equality appears difficult. Ireland is one of 31 countries covered in new research by the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London and the Ipsos polling group that found many things I didn't expect to see in 2024.
When it comes to granting women equal rights with men, 53 percent now believe things have gone far enough in their country, compared to 42 percent in 2019. This swing is clear from Thailand and Peru to Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Nearly half of the British population agree that work has been done on women's equality – compared to less than a third who thought so five years ago. Worse still, 47% of Britons believe we have done so much to promote women's equality that we discriminate against men. A similar proportion think this way in Ireland (45 per cent) and globally (46 per cent).
As expected, men tend to think this way more than women. But you might be surprised which guys. It turns out that people from Generation Z, who are not yet 30, are much more likely to hold these views than boomers who are twice their age.
It is unclear exactly what drives these views. Compelling arguments can be made for economic pressures, widening income inequality, and the polarization of social media. But one thing is certain: If men are truly discriminated against, the discriminators are doing a bad job of it.
Female equality has improved in many parts of the world, especially in education.
Male students have been outnumbered at universities in many countries for many years. But this has not yet translated into equal Nirvana.
Globally, women still earn 77 cents for every dollar paid to men, and spend an average of 2.4 additional hours per day doing unpaid care work.
Although more than a third of countries now have a female leader at some point, the latest data shows that at any point in time, the share of countries where the most powerful leader is a woman has never risen above 10 percent.
At current rates of progress, it will take an estimated 162 years for women to achieve political equality with men. It will take longer to end the economic inequality that fuels the physical or sexual violence that nearly a third of women worldwide have experienced in their lifetime. And so on and so on.
None of this means we should reject what men believe about gender equality. far from it. The more evidence we see of hardening positions, the more work we have to do to understand why. Because one thing is certain: inequality among women is still very real, and already long-standing efforts to abolish it still have far to go.
pilita.clark@ft.com
