Fisher Brendan, Naidoo Robin
Gund Institute, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Aiken Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America.
World Wildlife Fund, Washington, DC, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2016 Mar 1;11(3):e0145778. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0145778. eCollection 2016.
Reducing gender inequality is a major policy concern worldwide, and one of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, our understanding of the magnitude and spatial distribution of gender inequality results either from limited-scale case studies or from national-level statistics. Here, we produce the first high resolution map of gender inequality by analyzing over 689,000 households in 47 countries. Across these countries, we find that male-headed households have, on average, 13% more asset wealth and 303% more land for agriculture than do female-headed households. However, this aggregate global result masks a high degree of spatial heterogeneity, with bands of both high inequality and high equality apparent in countries and regions of the world. Further, areas where inequality is highest when measured by land ownership generally are not the same areas that have high inequality as measured by asset wealth. Our metrics of gender inequality in land and wealth are not strongly correlated with existing metrics of poverty, development, and income inequality, and therefore provide new information to increase the understanding of one critical dimension of poverty across the globe.
减少性别不平等是全球主要的政策关注点，也是可持续发展目标之一。然而，我们对性别不平等程度及其空间分布的了解，要么来自规模有限的案例研究，要么来自国家层面的统计数据。在此，我们通过分析47个国家的68.9万多户家庭，绘制出了首张性别不平等的高分辨率地图。在这些国家中，我们发现，平均而言，男性户主家庭的资产财富比女性户主家庭多13%，农业用地比女性户主家庭多303%。然而，这一全球总体结果掩盖了高度的空间异质性，在世界各国和各地区，不平等程度高和低的区域都很明显。此外，以土地所有权衡量不平等程度最高的地区，通常与以资产财富衡量不平等程度高的地区并不相同。我们衡量土地和财富方面性别不平等的指标，与现有的贫困、发展和收入不平等指标并没有很强的相关性，因此提供了新的信息，有助于增进对全球贫困这一关键维度的理解。
