Life’s just not fair — especially in these states.
A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE examined all 50 states to determine the best to worst places to live as a woman when looking at gender equality.
The results showed that Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma are the worst places for women in the United States.
Meanwhile, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming have the least equal treatment between men and women in the US.
“The more conservative a state, the higher its level of gender inequality,” the study concluded.
Massachusetts, California and Maine are the best places for women to live, according to the research, and Connecticut, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado also all scored high for equality between the sexes and greater well-being.
New York didn’t make the top 10, but the Empire State did rank 15th.
However, it should be noted that Vermont, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii were all excluded from the ranking due to a lack of data.
Psychologists from the University of Padova in Italy and New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates created their list following the metrics used by the United Nations to create their Gender Inequality Index (GII).
They considered factors such as teen pregnancy statistics (often used by social scientists as a gauge of high-quality educational access and more adequate protections against sexual abuse), deaths during pregnancy, percentages of women in political office, local polling on safety and financial well-being.
But gender inequality doesn’t just impact women.
States with lower equality for women had lower financial well-being for men, too.
“A lack of job opportunities for women,” the researchers wrote, “places a burden also on male earners, who face the added stress of supporting a family without the benefit of spousal earnings.”
They also noted that women become more vulnerable to domestic violence or abuse when they’re not financially independent.
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The gender pay gap is slowly being closed with women even outearning men in several cities — New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles — but the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the national debate over birth control has worsened many of the factors used to calculate women’s well-being and gender inequality.
“The need to address gender inequality not just as a social justice issue, but also as a means to boost in particular women’s but also men’s overall well-being,” the researchers concluded.
