Introduction
Despite decades of feminist advocacy, legislative reform, and shifting cultural norms, the aspiration of true gender equality remains elusive in virtually every society on earth. Deep-rooted biological differences, entrenched patriarchal structures, and persistent unconscious biases create barriers that no amount of policy intervention can fully dismantle. This essay argues that true gender equality, understood as the complete elimination of gender-based disparities in opportunity, outcome, and treatment, is ultimately impossible to achieve, though this recognition should not diminish the imperative to strive towards it.
Biological differences between men and women create inherent asymmetries, particularly around reproduction, that no policy can fully equalise.
Explain
Women bear the physiological burden of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, which inevitably interrupts careers and economic participation in ways that do not apply to men. While parental leave policies and workplace accommodations can mitigate these effects, they cannot eliminate the fundamental biological reality that reproduction imposes unequal physical demands on women. This asymmetry creates a structural disadvantage in the labour market that persists even in the most progressive societies.
Example
In the Nordic countries, widely regarded as the world's most gender-equal societies, a significant motherhood penalty persists. A 2018 study published in the American Economic Review found that Danish women experienced a 20% decline in earnings after the birth of their first child, with no corresponding decline for fathers, and that this gap had not diminished over two decades despite Denmark's generous parental leave and subsidised childcare. In Singapore, despite the government extending maternity leave to 16 weeks under the Child Development Co-Savings Act and introducing paternity leave, the Ministry of Manpower's 2022 Labour Force Survey showed that labour force participation for women aged 25-34 dropped by approximately 10 percentage points after childbirth, a gap that did not exist for men.
Link
This supports the argument that true gender equality is impossible, as even the most comprehensive policy interventions cannot fully neutralise the career and economic consequences of the biological reality that only women bear children.
Deeply entrenched cultural norms and unconscious biases perpetuate gender inequality in ways that legislation alone cannot eradicate.
Explain
Gender inequality is not merely a product of formal legal barriers but is woven into the fabric of cultural expectations, social norms, and unconscious assumptions about the roles of men and women. These biases operate at every level, from the toys given to children to the criteria used in hiring and promotion decisions. Because they are often invisible to those who hold them, unconscious biases are extraordinarily resistant to change, persisting even in societies with strong anti-discrimination laws.
Example
Harvard's Implicit Association Test, administered to over 17 million participants globally, consistently finds that approximately 75% of respondents, including women, associate men with careers and women with family roles, revealing the depth of unconscious gender bias. In the corporate world, a 2022 McKinsey and LeanIn.org Women in the Workplace study found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 87 women were promoted, and only 82 women of colour, a disparity attributed largely to subjective evaluation biases rather than differences in competence. In Singapore, despite strong legal frameworks for workplace equality, a 2021 study by the Institute of Policy Studies found that 40% of Singaporean women reported experiencing gender-based discrimination at work, with many citing assumptions that mothers were less committed employees.
Link
This demonstrates that true gender equality is impossible to achieve in practice, as deeply ingrained cultural biases operate beneath the reach of legislation and continue to shape outcomes even in societies formally committed to equality.
The persistent global gender gap in political leadership and economic power suggests structural ceilings that remain resistant to reform.
Explain
Despite significant progress in women's education and workforce participation, women remain dramatically underrepresented in the highest echelons of political and economic power worldwide. The pace of change at the top has been glacial, suggesting that the barriers to gender equality in leadership are not simply a pipeline issue that will self-correct over time but are structurally embedded in the institutions of power themselves. At the current rate of change, full parity in these domains lies centuries away.
Example
The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2023 estimated that at the current pace of progress, it would take 131 years to close the global gender gap, with political empowerment being the widest gap at 22.1% closed. As of 2023, women held only 26.7% of parliamentary seats worldwide, and only 31 countries had ever had a female head of state or government. In the corporate sphere, women comprised only 10.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs in 2023. In Singapore, women held 29.1% of seats in Parliament after the 2020 general election and comprised only 16.2% of board directors on SGX-listed companies as of 2022, despite women outperforming men academically at every level of the Singapore education system.
Link
This reinforces the argument that true gender equality is impossible to achieve, as the persistent underrepresentation of women at the highest levels of power, even in societies with strong educational and legal foundations for equality, reveals structural barriers that incremental reform has proven insufficient to overcome.
Counter-Argument
Opponents argue that the dramatic progress of the past century, from women's suffrage to female heads of state, demonstrates that gender equality is achievable through sustained reform. Iceland has closed over 91% of its gender gap through deliberate interventions including legislated equal pay certification and mandatory gender quotas, proving that institutional action can produce near-parity within a generation.
Rebuttal
Iceland's achievement, while commendable, remains an outlier that has not been replicated at scale, and even Iceland has not achieved full equality. The World Economic Forum's 2023 report estimated that at the current global rate of progress, closing the gender gap would take 131 years, with political empowerment being the widest gap at only 22.1% closed. The persistence of disparities even in the most progressive societies suggests that structural and biological asymmetries create a floor below which inequality cannot be reduced through policy alone, confirming that true gender equality, in the absolute sense, remains impossible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the sheer persistence of gender disparities across cultures, economies, and political systems suggests that true gender equality, in the absolute sense, is an unattainable ideal. Biological differences, deeply embedded cultural norms, and the limits of institutional enforcement mean that some degree of gender-based disparity will endure indefinitely. Nevertheless, the impossibility of perfection does not negate the moral imperative to pursue the closest possible approximation of equality, and every incremental gain remains profoundly worthwhile.
Introduction
The claim that true gender equality is impossible reflects a defeatist posture that misreads the trajectory of human progress and underestimates the transformative power of sustained institutional reform. History has repeatedly shown that what was once deemed impossible, from women's suffrage to female heads of state, has become reality within a matter of generations. This essay contends that true gender equality, while extraordinarily difficult, is not impossible to achieve, and that dismissing it as such risks legitimising complacency and entrenching the very inequalities we ought to dismantle.
The dramatic progress in closing gender gaps over the past century demonstrates that gender equality is achievable through sustained institutional reform.
Explain
A century ago, women in most countries could not vote, own property, or attend university. Today, women outnumber men in higher education enrolment in the majority of developed nations, participate in the workforce at historically unprecedented rates, and have ascended to the highest offices of political leadership. This remarkable transformation within a few generations demonstrates that gender inequality is not an immutable feature of human society but a product of institutional arrangements that can be deliberately reformed.
Example
Iceland, which topped the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index for the fourteenth consecutive year in 2023 with a score of 0.912 out of 1.0, demonstrates the tangible possibility of near-parity. The country achieved this through deliberate policy interventions including legislated equal pay certification (the world's first, enacted in 2018), mandatory gender quotas on corporate boards, and nine months of shared parental leave. Women comprise 47.6% of Iceland's parliament and 44% of corporate managers. Rwanda, despite its history of devastating conflict, leads the world in female parliamentary representation at 61.3% as of 2023, achieved through constitutional gender quotas introduced after the 1994 genocide, proving that transformative progress is possible even in the most challenging contexts.
Link
This challenges the claim that true gender equality is impossible, as the Icelandic and Rwandan experiences demonstrate that targeted institutional reforms can close gender gaps dramatically within a single generation, suggesting that full parity is a realistic aspiration rather than an impossible dream.
Advances in technology, workplace flexibility, and reproductive autonomy are dismantling the biological barriers that historically constrained gender equality.
Explain
The argument that biological differences make gender equality impossible relies on a static view of how societies accommodate those differences. Technological advances, from contraception to assisted reproduction to remote work, have progressively weakened the link between biological sex and social role. As workplaces become more flexible and reproductive choices expand, the structural disadvantages that women face due to childbearing are being steadily reduced, making the biological argument for inequality increasingly obsolete.
Example
The widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work following the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the calculus of the motherhood penalty. A 2023 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States found that remote work options reduced the gender pay gap among college-educated workers by approximately 20%, as mothers could maintain career continuity during early childhood years. In Singapore, the Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangements, which took effect in 2024, require all employers to fairly consider flexible work requests, a measure specifically designed to support working mothers. Furthermore, advances in egg freezing and IVF technology have given women greater control over reproductive timing, with the number of elective egg-freezing cycles in Singapore increasing fivefold between 2015 and 2023 after the government lifted restrictions on the procedure for women aged 21 to 35.
Link
This refutes the claim that gender equality is impossible, as technological and workplace innovations are systematically dismantling the biological and structural barriers that once constrained women's full and equal participation in economic and public life.
Generational shifts in attitudes toward gender roles suggest that cultural barriers to equality, while persistent, are not permanent.
Explain
The cultural norms and unconscious biases that sustain gender inequality are not fixed features of human psychology but are socially constructed and therefore amenable to change across generations. Younger cohorts in nearly every society hold substantially more egalitarian views on gender than their parents and grandparents, suggesting that the cultural foundations of gender inequality are eroding. As these younger generations assume positions of institutional power, the norms governing workplaces, families, and political systems will shift correspondingly.
Example
A comprehensive 2023 Pew Research Centre study across 24 countries found that respondents under 30 were significantly more likely than those over 50 to support gender equality in employment, education, and political leadership. In South Korea, traditionally one of Asia's most patriarchal societies, a dramatic generational shift has occurred: the country's total fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023, the world's lowest, driven in significant part by young women rejecting traditional expectations of marriage and motherhood in favour of career and personal autonomy. In Singapore, a 2022 National Youth Survey found that 85% of respondents aged 15 to 35 agreed that men and women should share household responsibilities equally, compared to only 58% of respondents aged 55 and above, indicating a clear generational trajectory toward more egalitarian norms.
Link
This demonstrates that true gender equality is not impossible but is, in fact, progressively being realised through generational cultural change, as younger cohorts internalise egalitarian norms that will reshape institutions and expectations as they come to positions of influence.
Counter-Argument
Proponents of impossibility highlight that biological differences in reproduction create inherent career asymmetries that no policy can eliminate, citing a 2018 study showing a persistent 20% earnings decline for Danish mothers with no corresponding decline for fathers, even in one of the world's most gender-equal societies. They argue this motherhood penalty is an irreducible barrier to true equality.
Rebuttal
This argument treats current social arrangements as immutable when they are demonstrably changing. The widespread adoption of remote work after COVID-19 reduced the gender pay gap among college-educated workers by approximately 20%, according to a 2023 NBER study, as mothers could maintain career continuity. Singapore's Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangements and advances in reproductive technology such as elective egg freezing are progressively dismantling the link between biological sex and career trajectory, making the biological argument for permanent inequality increasingly obsolete.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the assertion that true gender equality is impossible to achieve is an empirically unsupported surrender to pessimism that ignores the remarkable progress already made. The narrowing of gender gaps in education, political representation, and economic participation across dozens of countries demonstrates that systemic change is not only possible but accelerating. While the journey toward full equality is long and fraught with setbacks, history teaches us that what one generation considers impossible, the next accepts as inevitable.