Poverty hurts the boys the most: Inequality at the intersection of class and gender

One of the cognitive curses of the human mind is the tendency to chop everything into two: black and white, rich and poor, men and women, North and South, and so on. By instinct, we tend to lump people together into clear and distinct categories, preferably just two. The world seems simpler that way.

But of course, the world is not simple. People are not sorted into neat boxes. One unfortunate consequence of this binary worldview is what public health expert and “factfulness” advocate Hans Rosling calls the “gap instinct…to divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups with an imagined gap in-between (e.g., rich vs poor countries).”