Brand power in tackling Asia's gender divide and rewriting the story of equality

Recent years have witnessed the global deterioration of women’s rights. Following the erosive impacts of Covid on gender equality, and legal assaults such as the reversal of Roe V Wade in the USA, currently the landscape of gender equality stands in an increasingly precarious position.

Nine out of 10 people are biased against women, and the UN predicts that it will take a further 286 years to close the gap in legal protection for women and girls. Internationally, East Asia and the Pacific and Southern Asia rank amongst the bottom three regions for gender gap closed to date. The impacts of gender inequality create insidious and lasting damage. Firstly, for the individual girls and women experiencing them, whose mental and physical well-being, as well as life opportunities, are continuously hurt by patriarchal structures. But, secondly, for the wider communities they are a part of, with global research suggesting that when women thrive, so does the rest of society. As brands look to tackle this detrimental reversal in gender equality, it must be viewed as nothing less than a greatest human right challenge not just to women, but to the world at large.

Education and work

In the aftermath of the pandemic, women made up 54% of global job losses despite only making up 39% of the workforce. In India, for instance, the number of women in the labour force dropped below 20%. The knock on impacts of this have been far reaching. But far from being new, the impacts of girls and women being kept out of both education and the workforce in Asia are deeply entrenched and damaging.

Women and girls in Asia are systematically kept out of education and work by a range of factors, from poverty to patriarchal gender traditions. In South Asia, girls are three times less likely to go to school than boys, resulting in 35% of women not being able to read or write and 46.5% not participating in any form of education, employment or training. A report from UNESCO concludes that keeping girls out of school heightens the risk of “adolescent pregnancy, early and forced marriage, and violence”, illustrating a deep and persistent impact on life outcomes.

Working to address this, brands have stepped up in a variety of ways. Tanishq Jewellery’s Mother’s Day Campaign flips the script on motherhood in India, empowering women to return to work post-maternity leave by highlighting the transferable skills that women gain throughout motherhood. On the other hand, Nike’s female empowerment initiative ‘Boundless Girls’ seeks to empower girls in China by encouraging them to participate in play, engaging in localised eco-friendly efforts to provide opportunities.

These approaches demonstrate two ways to support the participation of girls and women in education and work; firstly by working to challenge social views and therefore reduce prejudice induced barriers, and secondly providing tangible and locally specific opportunities for support and development.

Violence

Women in the Asia-Pacific region experience violence at a rate much higher than the global average. In Southeast Asia 33% of women with male partners aged 15-49 will be victim to physical and/or sexual violence at the hands of a present or previous partner on at least one occasion in their lifetime. With 68% of women in India reporting having experienced violence on public transport, and 75% of women in the Asia Pacific region experiencing sexual harassment, the issue transcends domestic and private settings. Research suggests that this high prevalence of violence against women in the region, which they are all too often not protected from in law, is linked to severe health risks for both the women themselves and their families, as well as stunting workplace productivity and the growth of household economies.

With emotive campaigns, brands such as L’Oreal have worked to shed light on issues of sexual harassment in China, whilst Dove has tackled forced haircut practices in schools in Thailand.

Photo: China’s International Women’s Festival

These campaigns work to engage wider audiences in a conversation that has traditionally been treated as taboo. By leading with a radically transparent approach, these campaigns disrupt the silence that enables such systems to go unquestioned. Secondly, Dove’s campaign actively engages the public in citizenship efforts. Encouraging 2,800 people to pledge their support to the cause to end forced haircuts, the campaign backs up awareness with action.

Health stigma

Globally, as a result of the exclusion of women from medical trials until 1993, women spend 25% more time in poor health than men. Further, with trials also underrepresenting minority ethnic groups, there is a paucity of information tailored to ethnic minority women.

Women in Asia have limited access to healthcare resources, a problem fuelled by both systemic issues with health infrastructure, and cultural taboos that have created stigma around women’s health, causing an education gap amongst women as well as their healthcare providers. Speaking to the limitations of healthcare infrastructure, the economic crisis in Sri Lanka is currently putting pregnant and breastfeeding women at risk of malnutrition, particularly impacting those women living in poverty in Colombo.

Cultural taboos result in 79% of Indian women feeling uncomfortable talking about menopause with their family, friends, and colleagues, and further a paucity of period education, resulting in 20% of girls in India dropping out of school each year. Further, gender expectations surrounding family obligations lead 21% of women in the APAC region to report that they are more likely to have delayed or avoided medical treatment.

1 out of 5 girls in the country drop out of school when they get their periods. Photo: Whisper India

A campaign from Whisper aims to erode the taboos surrounding periods in India through education, whilst Elda Health is a femtech start up helping Indian women manage menopause symptoms. Whisper’s campaign not only works to address taboos and raise awareness but to provide invaluable period education to both mothers and their daughters. Elda Health conversely provides a centralised space, empowering women to autonomously look after their own health outside of systems that undermine, stigmatise, and misunderstand their needs.

What next?

In the depths of a critical tipping point for the future of women’s rights, brands can and should contribute to fighting to close the gap. By leaning away from silence and towards radical openness, brands can both sway the cultural tide, create open discourse, and provide opportunities for tangible change, whether that's at a personal, local or regional level. In doing so, they will achieve the most significant success by understanding and addressing the cultural nuances of local issues rather than taking a one size fits all approach. In recognising gender inequality as one of the greatest human rights challenges of modern society, and further as inextricably linked to the wellbeing of all of society, today and every day after it, action is of the utmost importance.

Bailey Bellingy is a behavioural analyst at Singapore-based agency Canvas8.