By Olusola Oyedele Oladeji
For decades, the world has clamoured for gender equality; a vision of men and women standing side by side with the same rights, opportunities, and recognition. Yet beneath this noble cry lies a subtle flaw: equality, which when pursued without context, assumes that everyone begins from the same starting point. In truth, society has never been an even field. It is a system layered with privilege, bias, and unequal access.
The word equality finds its root in the Latin aequalis (Oxford English Dictionary), meaning ‘even’ or ‘uniform’. It implies sameness in rights, quantity, or value. Equity, on the other hand, stems from aequitas (Oxford English Dictionary), meaning ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’. Unlike equality, equity acknowledges differences in experience, circumstance, and need, and seeks to distribute resources in a way that corrects those imbalances without assumptions.
Applied to gender, these words take on urgent significance. The global plea for gender equality is not misplaced, it represents a long-overdue demand for fairness in education, politics, work, and family life. Yet, many fail to realise that equality cannot easily be handed out; it must be built upon the foundation of equity. Women and gender diverse people do not face identical social conditions to men. Historical bias, economic disparity, cultural expectations, and unequal access to opportunity create barriers that equality alone cannot break. This reality is further complicated by intersectionality, a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, which explains how overlapping identities such as race, class, and gender interact to produce compounded forms of disadvantage. As a result, people are not inherently equal to others within their own gender group. In my book, The Loner, I write, ‘The world preaches fairness, yet builds walls where bridges should stand.’ This line captures the paradox of modern justice, a society that claims to give everyone an equal chance but rarely removes the differing obstacles in their way.
WHY EQUALITY ALONE FAILS WOMEN
The pursuit of gender equality has long been painted as the ultimate victory for women’s rights.
Consider the workplace. Equality demands equal pay for equal work. Equity asks deeper questions. Who has access to those jobs in the first place? Who bears the invisible cost of unpaid care, of maternity, and of cultural expectation? According to UN Women, women globally perform nearly three times more unpaid care and domestic work than men. That difference, ‘unseen and unpaid’, directly affects their ability to compete equally in the formal economy. While equality may claim to offer all genders the same office desk, equity insists that everyone should have a genuine chance to sit at it.
The same principle plays out in education. Many parts of the world offer ‘equal access’ to schooling for all children. Yet practical uptake is limited as millions of girls still drop out due to cultural restrictions, early marriage, or the absence of menstrual hygiene facilities. Equality says the classroom door is open to all; equity ensures every girl can walk through it without shame or barrier.
Even in political representation, the illusion of equality persists. Many democratic systems boast near-universal adult suffrage and right to run for office. But equality cannot erase the intimidation, funding disadvantages, or gender bias that keep women from contesting freely. Where equity is absent, equal rights become symbolic gestures, not transformative change.
Cultural expectations deepen this imbalance. Society still views ambition differently across genders. A man’s assertiveness is leadership; a woman’s is aggression. A man’s dedication to work is commitment; a woman’s is neglect of family. Equality cannot rewrite these perceptions, only equity can challenge and reshape them through education, advocacy, and structural reform.
Equity, therefore, is not a threat to equality; it is its most faithful ally. It ensures that equality does not remain a privilege for those already advantaged, but becomes a reachable reality for those held back by systemic bias. To ask for equity is not to ask for favouritism, it is the recognition that justice must first heal before it can balance.
EQUITY AS THE REPAIR PROCESS
If equality is the ideal of a just world, equity is the tool that builds it. It is the slow, deliberate process of repair, the patient mending of wounds that centuries of gender imbalance have left behind.
In education, gender equity requires addressing the reasons why girls are more likely to drop out: poverty, early marriage, domestic expectations, menstrual hygiene, and transport safety. Reformative system design, scholarship and mentorship programs, and promoting cultural support of women’s education are all critical in achieving equity in education. Equity builds scaffolds where equality merely hands out ladders.
In workplaces, equity requires challenging structures that favour men; the after-hours meetings scheduled when many women must be home caring for families, the maternity breaks seen as professional weaknesses, the leadership roles often assigned to those with fewer domestic obligations. True gender equity does not demand that women behave like men to succeed; it demands that systems evolve to accommodate all without bias. Flexible work hours, parental leave for all genders, and pay equity policies are all steps in this repair process.
Politically, equity means more than the right to vote or run for office. Some nations have implemented gender quotas, not as charity, but as correction (International IDEA; UN Women, 2023). Individual parties can aid equity by elevating women in the pre-selection process. These measures are not about granting unearned advantage; they are about restoring visibility to half of humanity whose perspectives have been historically silenced. Equity ensures that decisions about women are not made without women.
But perhaps the deepest form of equity can be found not in laws or workplaces, but in minds, in the quiet reshaping of perception. The process of repair begins at its most crucial level: culture. We must raise boys to see leadership as genderless and encourage girls to see strength as human and not exclusively masculine. Laws can open doors, but only equity in community spirit ensures everyone walks through them freely.
TOWARDS LIBERATION
Equality is often framed as the destination, with equity as the journey toward it, but true justice may extend beyond both and into liberation from the structures that produced inequality in the first place.
Our systems, in education, work, politics, and culture, must move beyond the illusion of sameness and embrace fairness that considers difference. The provisions which consider and attempt to address the unique disadvantages faced by women should not be seen as privileges but as corrective mechanisms. When a woman is offered maternity leave, it is not a privilege; it is equity at work. When a girl in a conservative village receives a scholarship meant only for girls, it is not favouritism; it is repair. When leadership quotas reserve space for women, it is not pity; it is corrective action aimed at addressing long-standing underrepresentation. These are the steps that pave the road toward equality that is not symbolic—but lived. With work, time, and systemic reform, such provisions will no longer be required. In the liberated world we are working towards, equality will not need to be manufactured in hindsight, it will be built into the system in the first place.
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References
UN Women (2020). Unpaid Care and Domestic Work. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/unpaid-work
Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). Aequalis. In Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/
Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). Aequitas. In Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/
International IDEA. (2023). Gender quotas database and global trends in political representation. https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas