The Gender Equality Index is a composite indicator that measures the complex concept of gender equality and assists in monitoring progress of gender equality across the EU over time.

Help all students build digital citizenship skills for more inclusive, positive, and safer schools.

Chile’s feminist anthem “The rapist is you,” went viral in 2019. The chant became an anthem for women during the social unrest of 2019, which was sparked by deepening inequality in the country. The song had a global impact, but the struggle for equality back in Chile continues, we meet the women leading the charge.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has been described as the ‘rape capital of the world.’ Gynecologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Denis Mukwege has been fighting for years to help rape survivors. German doctor Gisela Schneider goes to visit him.

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Many parents might be unfamiliar with the word "simp," but chances are your tween or teen has used or at least heard the term. Simp is slang for a person (typically a man) who is desperate for the attention and affection of someone else (typically a woman).

Gender dysphoria—the miserable feeling of being at odds with one’s sex—is one of the fastest-rising medical complaints among children. America had one paediatric gender clinic in 2007. It now has at least 50. The sole paediatric gender clinic for England and Wales, known by its acronym, gids, has seen referrals rise 30-fold in a decade. A similar pattern is evident across the rich world.

Many attending such clinics are given gonadotropin-releasing hormone (gnrh) agonists, or “puberty blockers”. These drugs, licensed to treat cancers of the breast and prostate, endometriosis and “central precocious puberty”—a rare condition in which puberty starts far earlier than normal—are prescribed off-label to stop the signals that stimulate the testicles or ovaries to ramp up sex-hormone production. The idea is to delay puberty, buying time for patients to decide whether to proceed to cross-sex hormones and surgery with the aim of “passing” as adult members of the opposite sex.

All drugs offer a mix of harms and benefits. But despite their popularity, the effects of puberty blockers remain unclear. Because they are not licensed for gender medicine, drug firms have done no trials. Record-keeping in many clinics is poor. A 2018 review by researchers at the University of Melbourne described the evidence for their use as “low-quality”. In December British judges likewise flagged the lack of a “firm evidence base” when ruling that children were unlikely to be able to give meaningful consent to taking them. Britain’s National Health Service recently withdrew a claim, still made elsewhere, that their effects are “fully reversible”.

The studies that do exist are at once weak and worrying. The day after the court ruling, gids published a study that found children were happy to receive the drugs. But there was little other evidence of benefit—not even a reduction in gender dysphoria. Two older studies of Dutch patients given puberty blockers in the 1990s found that gender dysphoria eased afterwards. But without a control group, it is impossible to tell how patients would have felt had they not taken the drugs.

A 2020 paper analysed responses to an online survey and concluded that people who had taken puberty blockers were less prone to suicidal thoughts. But online surveys capture convenient samples, not representative ones. People may answer repeatedly, or at random. Much of the data appeared to be misreported: many who said they had taken puberty blockers were too old to have plausibly done so.

In the absence of direct, robust evidence, researchers can try to extrapolate from other findings. Off-label prescribing is common in paediatric medicine, because drug firms do not generally like running trials on children. So doctors look for second-hand evidence from elsewhere to guide their decisions. One source is studies that look at how gnrh agonists are used to treat other conditions.

Interrupting normal adolescence is not the same as treating cancer, endometriosis or precocious puberty. Nevertheless, data from these conditions have flagged unpleasant side-effects. Men who take gnrh agonists lose energy and sexual desire. (This is why some countries prescribe them to sex offenders.) Women are thrust into an artificial menopause, an experience unpleasant enough that, in endometriosis, drugs are typically prescribed for six months at most. Several legal cases have been brought against drug firms by adults who took puberty blockers for precocious puberty. They allege cognitive deficits, brittle bones and chronic pain in later life, though none has made it to court.

Animal studies suggest such concerns may be worth investigating. One 2017 study looked at sheep, which go through a developmental spurt similar to human adolescence. Sheep given puberty-blockers performed worse than controls on a maze-navigation task, suggesting their spatial memory was inferior. A 2020 paper looking at mice found, among other things, that females given puberty blockers were more timid in unfamiliar environments, and gave up sooner on a “forced swim” test that is commonly used to assess whether anti-depressants work.

One big worry is that puberty blockers seem to reliably lead to cross-sex hormones, in what doctors call a “cascade of interventions”. The best estimate, from studies starting in the 1970s, is that around 80% of gender-dysphoric children who are allowed to express themselves as they wish, but who do not socially transition—change their clothes, pronouns and the like to present as members of the opposite sex—will, as they grow up, become reconciled to their biological sex. Yet puberty blockers seem to prevent that reconciliation. In European clinics that report numbers, it happens with just 2-4% of children given the drugs. American clinics rarely publish figures, but anecdotally the picture is similar.

Such numbers led British judges to rule that the effects of those subsequent treatments should be taken into account when assessing puberty blockers. Besides their intended effects, such as the growth of breasts or facial hair, cross-sex hormones also cause side-effects. One 2018 study concluded that females who take testosterone are more likely to suffer cardiovascular disease, while males who take oestrogen have higher risk of blood clots and strokes. The additional risk grew the longer the patients remained on hormones.

Some doctors worry about osteoporosis. Bone density rises sharply during puberty, but blockers disrupt that process. If they are followed by cross-sex hormones they are very likely to impair fertility, even if hormones are later stopped—though the lack of studies means no one knows how much, says Will Malone, an American endocrinologist and member of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a new group. If the cascade of intervention ends with removal of the testicles or ovaries the result will be sterility.

Despite the uncertainties, professional bodies have endorsed the drugs. In a 2018 position paper the American Association of Paediatrics (aap) described “gender-affirmative” care as the only ethical approach. Not everyone is convinced. James Cantor, a Canadian clinical psychologist, published a paper accusing the aap of misstating the contents of its citations, which “repeatedly said the very opposite of what the aap attributed to them”. (Asked for comment, the aap restated its position.) Marcus Evans, a psychoanalyst, resigned from the board that oversees gids over worries about “experimental” treatments.

The best way to settle such disputes is the same as in any other part of medicine: a big, well-run clinical trial. So far, despite soaring caseloads, and puberty blockers having been prescribed for decades, no one is planning to conduct one

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A California man was arrested after making online threats against the dictionary publisher over their entries that defined women, investigators said.

A California man was arrested this week for allegedly threating to bomb Merriam-Webster's offices and kill its employees over the dictionary publisher's definitions for women, federal prosecutors said.

Jeremy David Hanson, 34, of Rossmoor, California, was charged on April 20 with one count of interstate communication of threats to commit violence for alleged online threats that he sent to the company in October, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts.

Hanson allegedly sent the company several threatening messages through its "Contact us" section on its website and in the comments section on its webpages that corresponded to the word entries for “Girl” and “Woman.” Rachael Rollins, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said. Rollins said the threats were serious enough to force Merriam-Webster to close its Springfield and New York offices out of an abundance of caution.

"We believe Hanson sent a multitude of anonymous threatening and despicable messages related to the LGBTQ community that were intended to evoke fear and division," she said in a statement.

Hanson allegedly used the handle “@anonYmous” to post the a message on Oct. 2 on the comment section of Merriam-Webster's webpage for the definition of the word female stating that "Merriam-Webster now tells blatant lies and promotes anti-science propaganda," according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

"There is no such thing as 'gender identity.' The imbecile who wrote this entry should be hunted down and shot," he allegedly wrote in the comment section.

Hanson also allegedly wrote a message on the "Contact us" page stating the company's headquarters should be "shot up and bombed," federal prosecutors said.

"It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive,” he allegedly wrote.

Hanson posted a similar message on the "Contact us" page on Oct. 8, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

The suspect allegedly sent related threats to other companies, non-profits and individuals including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Land O’ Lakes, Hasbro, Inc., IGN Entertainment, the president of the University of North Texas, two professors at Loyola Marymount University and a New York City rabbi, according to prosecutors.

"Threats to life are most certainly not protected speech and they cause real fear in victims," Joseph R. Bonavolonta, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Boston Division, said in a statement.

Attorney information for Hanson wasn't immediately available.

He was released on conditions following a court appearance in the Central District of California, prosecutors said. He is scheduled to appear before U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Katherine A. Robertson in federal court in Springfield on April 29, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

Millions of women across Mexico are expected to strike against gender-based violence on Monday. It comes after a year of countless protests against sexual harassment, abuse and murder.
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Violence against women in Colombia is worsening under coronavirus lockdowns. The killing of a woman and her daughter has sparked many to take to the streets of the capital, Bogota.
But, those murders were just the latest in a long list of crimes.

A growing awareness of this, combined with activists’ call for transgender people to be recognised as members of the gender with which they identify, is leading to changes in the way trans prisoners are housed. In most cases, such inmates (the majority of whom are trans women) are incarcerated with members of their biological sex. But this month, California introduced a law allowing prisoners to request to be housed in accordance with their gender identity. Similar policies have been introduced elsewhere after transgender inmates sued for mistreatment.

Trans activists’ insistence that trans women be treated as women is also influencing federal lawmakers. On his first day in the White House, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to consider anti-discrimination measures in which he said that “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room or school sports.” The Equality Act, which he has promised to make law, would redefine the “sex” of the amendments of the Civil Rights Act to include “gender identity” (that is, a person’s sense of their gender regardless of whether they have taken cross-sex hormones or undergone surgery). The logical outcome of that would seem to be admitting trans women to spaces once reserved for women, from sports teams to prisons.


America needs federal legislation to protect trans people from discrimination: in many states there may be nothing illegal about a landlord refusing to rent an apartment to a trans person, for example. But policies grounded in the flawed conflation of biological sex and gender identity will lead to more problems than they solve, because they create a clash between the rights of women and those of trans women.

Prisons offer a particularly worrying example of this. There are two obvious problems with putting trans women in female prisons. The first concerns safety. Most trans women pose no threat to women. But denying the reality of biological sex ignores the fact that men are much the more violent of the two sexes. In America they commit 90% of murders and constitute 92% of the prison population. There is no evidence that trans women have lower levels of criminality than men.

California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (cdcr) says the 130-plus prisoners who have so far requested they switch prisons (out of a trans population of around 1,000) are “predominantly” trans women. (This may also be because there are fewer trans men). Inmates’ requests to move are not granted automatically; they are assessed by a panel that is mindful that some male sex offenders will claim to be trans to gain access to victims.

But even if it were possible to weed out all sexual predators—some assaults, like flashing, rarely show up in criminal records —there would remain another, more widespread problem. Women’s right to separate spaces is not only about safety; it is also about privacy. “Women have a right to disrobe out of the sight of men,” says Ann Menasche, a lawyer with Feminists In Struggle which is lobbying to change the wording of the Equality Act. In prison that may be especially important. Most incarcerated women have suffered trauma: the American Civil Liberties Union says 92% of all women in California prisons have been “battered and abused”.

No one has surveyed female inmates about their views on how trans prisoners should be housed; “no one would dare, in the current climate,” says Ms Menasche. But it seems probable that most would rather not share a cell or shower with someone with the defining sex characteristics of a man. Most transwomen have not undergone “bottom surgery”: a survey by the National Centre of Transgender Equality found that 12% had undergone vaginoplasty or labiaplasty and 11% had a orchiectomy (the removal of one or more testicle).

How to balance the welfare of trans women and women inmates? When posed this question, transgender activists, who increasingly express dislike of the term “biological sex,” deny that any such tension exists. “Trans women are women,” says Shawn Meerkamper, a lawyer with the Transgender Law Centre, which helped draw up California’s new law.

The refusal to discuss any alternative to policies that ignore the meaning of “sex” precludes the exploration of better solutions. In Britain, the fear that allowing transwomen into women prisons endangers females prompted the establishment of a separate trans wing in a women’s prison in London. But this is unlikely to be copied in America: transgender-only spaces correspond with laws that protect transgender people as a separate category rather than those that count them as members of the sex with which they identify.

Changes to the way trans prisoners are housed are likely to come slowly. Guidelines introduced in 2012 that require all federal and state prisons to ask trans inmates whether they would feel safest in a men’s or women’s prison appear to have had little effect on where they are placed. But as more trans women enter women’s prisons, the problems this will entail will spark court cases. That may prompt a rethink. In the meantime, this policy will be tested at the expense of an unusually vulnerable and voiceless group.

ECONOMISTS HAVE long tried to calculate the value of unpaid housework. In terms of inputs and outputs, the contributions of a stay-at-home parent can easily be overlooked, hidden in the folds of freshly ironed shirts and the contents of a full belly. The courts, too, have tried their hand at putting a price on housework. Recent divorce cases show they are willing to hand out extra cash to the spouse who does more of the cleaning up.

Last month China was shocked when a court ordered a man to pay his wife $7,700 for housework during their five-year marriage. The wife, known as Ms Wang, told a judge in Beijing that she “looked after the child and managed the household chores while [her husband] did not care about or participate in any other household affairs besides going to work”. On average, Chinese women spend four hours a day on housework, compared with about an hour and a half for men. (The gap is even wider in India: five hours for women to half an hour for men.)

Luke Ablett responds to a question on whether we’ll ever see true gender equality in Australia.