Evolving patterns of gender inequality over time and across countries

The last century has seen significant gains in women’s agency and status, declining gender gaps in labor force participation, education, and wages, and ‘a rising tide’ of increasingly gender egalitarian societies. Many expected this process to continue. Yet, unexpectedly, progress towards gender equality has started to stall in many countries. We can even observe a clear backlash against gender equality in some countries. The optimistic predictions of gender convergence as suggested by modernization theory have not materialized. Moreover, counterintuitively, the most gender egalitarian societies (e.g., Denmark and Sweden) have the highest level of gender segregation in jobs and educational fields, a phenomenon also known as the gender-equality paradox. In these countries, women are less likely to major in STEM and more likely to major in the humanities, with generally important consequences for the gender gap in wages. These observations matter for the field of international business (IB), which has studied cross-country differences in gender equality and the implications for management practices across the world. Our theories in IB cannot explain the gender-equality paradox or the backlash against gender equality observed across countries. The good news is that new theorizing is emerging in sociology and political science, with tremendous opportunities for IB. The purpose of our editorial is to describe how these insights can propel IB research, and to chart an exciting way forward.