8.13: Key Terms

Words to Know

• Bodily autonomy: The ability of individuals to make meaningful decisions about their own bodies, health, sexuality, and reproduction without coercion or unreasonable institutional barriers.
• Care economy: The paid and unpaid labor involved in caring for children, older adults, people who are ill or disabled, households, and communities.
• CEDAW: The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979 as an international framework addressing discrimination against women.
• Descriptive representation: Political representation in which elected officials or leaders share demographic characteristics with the population they represent.
• Double burden: The combination of paid employment and disproportionate responsibility for unpaid household and caregiving labor.
• Formal equality: Equality established through laws, rules, or official policies that apply the same legal standards to different groups.
• Gender: Socially constructed roles, expectations, identities, relationships, and institutions associated with masculinity, femininity, and other gender identities.
• Gender-based violence: Violence directed at a person because of gender or violence that disproportionately affects people of a particular gender.
• Gender mainstreaming: The practice of incorporating gender analysis into policy design, implementation, budgeting, and evaluation across government or institutional activities rather than isolating gender concerns within a single program.
• Gender norms: Social expectations regarding how people of different genders are expected to behave, work, dress, communicate, form relationships, or participate in society.
• Gender parity: A condition in which women and men participate or are represented in roughly equal proportions within a particular institution or activity.
• Gender quota: A policy requiring or encouraging a specified minimum level of representation for a gender within political, educational, corporate, or other institutions.
• Global care chain: A transnational arrangement in which caregiving labor is transferred across households and countries, often through the migration of women who provide paid care abroad while others care for their own families at home.
• Intersectionality: A framework for understanding how systems such as gender, race, class, caste, sexuality, disability, nationality, and other forms of inequality interact rather than operating independently.
• Patriarchy: A social system in which political, economic, cultural, or familial institutions historically privilege men and masculinity relative to women and other gender identities.
• Substantive equality: Equality measured not simply by whether people possess the same formal rights but by whether they have the practical resources and opportunities needed to exercise those rights.
• Substantive representation: Political representation in which leaders actively advance the interests, priorities, or concerns of particular populations, regardless of whether they share those populations' demographic characteristics.
• Technology-facilitated gender-based violence: Gender-based abuse conducted or amplified through digital technologies, including stalking, threats, harassment, impersonation, nonconsensual image sharing, and sexual deepfakes.
• Unpaid care work: Domestic and caregiving labor performed without direct monetary compensation, including cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, and care for family members who are ill or disabled.
• Women, Peace and Security Agenda: The international policy framework associated with UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions emphasizing women's protection and meaningful participation in conflict prevention, peace processes, peacekeeping, and post-conflict reconstruction.