Gender inequality creates the social conditions for violence against women to occur. There are four key expressions of gender inequality that have been found to predict or drive this violence. To prevent violence against women, we must focus our efforts on addressing these drivers. Men's control of decision making and limits to women's independence in public life and relationships is one of these drivers, where women's autonomy in both public life and private relationships is constrained. This can include undermining women's decision making and leadership in public life, or relationships where men control a woman's personal, financial or social independence.
Findings from the National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (2017) support and reinforce this driver of violence against women. For example, many Australians:
Men's control of decision making and resources in the home, workplace or community can have serious consequences for women. Within public life, the overrepresentation of men in leadership positions and their control of decision making in the workplace has a flow on effect for women, whereby women:
Women in professions such as STEM, banking and finance, law, medicine and emergency services face strong cultural and institutional obstacles to leadership. This is despite the fact that women often have far higher postgraduate qualifications and are more likely to be overqualified for their work and wage than men in the same work.1
Men's control over decision making within the private realm of heterosexual relationships and the family can limit women's participation in public life. For example, the 'man of the house' can have the power to determine whether or not a woman can work and have economic independence. Women's financial dependence on men is a barrier to them seeking safety from violence.2
Normalised control of decision making in relationships can also normalise controlling behaviours that increase the risk of intimate partner and family violence. This imbalance in power means that men have more opportunity to abuse that power with violence. Women, in turn, have less power to stop violence, call it out or leave.3
Men's control of decision making and limits to women's independence play a major role in shaping the way individuals, organisations and communities respond to violence. The socio-ecological model is used to help explain how violence is a product of multiple, interacting factors at the individual, organisational, systemic and societal levels.
The four gendered drivers exist at all of these levels and are the social conditions which predict, or 'drive', higher levels of violence against women.
Adapted from Change the Story, Our Watch (2015)
The socio-ecological model helps us understand how men's control of decision making and limits to women's independence manifest within different settings where people live, learn, work, socialise and play. Understanding this can help us plan prevention approaches to address violence against women within these spheres of life.
The more that women's independence and decision making is promoted in public and private life as well as across society, the more influence and positive change we will see.
At an individual or relationship level, men's control of decision making and limits to women's independence can look like:
At an organisational or community level, men's control of decision-making and limits to women's independence can look like:
At an institutional or systemic level, men's control of decision making and limits to women's independence can look like:
At a societal level, men's control of decision making and limits to women's independence can look like:
To address men's control in decision making and limits to women's independence we must promote women's independence and decision making in public life and in their relationships. This means supporting women's leadership (in all its forms), autonomy and social connectedness, and challenging the norms, practices and structures that enable and perpetuate men's control and dominance across different levels of society. Promoting alternatives could include:
What you can do:
[1] Victorian Government, Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2016: Safe and Strong: A Victorian Gender Equality Strategy
[2] Our Watch, 2018: Workplace Equality and Respect Standards
[3] ibid