Gender Equality is very broad and has many dimensions in which improvement is still needed. In “The Sustainable Development Goals” six underlying targets were listed. This project focuses on the target number five: “Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life”. It is said that a better education leads to a higher chance of a successful career (Brahmapurkar, 2017). The targets of goal number 5 often imply that women have the ability to read to reach these targets. While achieving the same level of literacy between the genders is not formulated as a target as such, it is the basis to achieve the targets. This is why literacy rate is one indicator that we looked at in this project. As a second indicator, the labor force participation was investigated. According to Ortiz Rodríguez & Pillai (2019) a high labor force participation rate indicates more gender equality and a better education in developing countries. However, it can also be seen as an indicator for poverty as both parents must have an income (Verick, 2014). For this project three research questions were developed:
To investigate those research questions, worldwide time series of the literacy rate as well as the labor force participation were analyzed. The data was divided into three categories: female, male, and adults in general. We looked at a timespan from 1970 to 2020. Most countries in the world, especially developing countries, provide regular data on the literacy rate as well as the labor force participation rate per gender. We visualized this change over time with an interactive map.