Have you ever felt talked over, ignored or just plain pumped to a pulp (metaphorically speaking)?

Chances are, you’re more likely to have experienced this at some point if you’re a woman.

A groundbreaking new report by the United Nations Development Programme released on Thursday showed that nearly 90 per cent of people of both genders – 9 in 10 – are biased against women. And what makes the prejudice hard to truly pinpoint is that, unlike other forms of racism and exclusion, it’s hard to call out gender bias when a lot of it also comes from your own gender.

Aptly enough, the UN gender social norm index was released on the same day that Senator Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the election race after drawing only one in 10 votes from the women in her Massachusetts constituency. This shows, that even though women have acquired the vote, they still won’t vote for themselves.

In Greece, the current conservative government was criticised when it came to power for having only two women representatives in a cabinet of 22. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said: “We put a quota for women, 40 per cent of our candidates were women,which is a big step forward. But if you look at the composition of parliament, we don’t have 40 per cent of women in parliament.”

If women don’t believe in themselves enough to take on leadership roles, what chance do they have in making others believe in them?

READ MORE: Women take centre stage at Delphi Bank’s annual Women’s Day luncheon

But that’s just one facet of the report, another section showed that the progress toward gender equality is on a slump. A chart in the report showed that society reached a progress plateau following great progress in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, despite the #metoo movement, there has been a relative standstill in the struggle for gender equality. One reason, according to the authors, is that the fight for gender equality must now address harder-to-navigate issues.

One issue is the deeply ingrained prejudice that women themselves have against genuine equality and their own expectations based on what they have experienced and come to expect from the world around them.

The term self-fulfilling prophecy was first coined by 20th-century sociologist Robert K. Merton who defined that a negative or positive belief or expectation can affect a person’s or groups actions to lead to the fulfilment of those expectations. A girl, for example, expects that she will perform poorly in maths leading in actions that bring about poor results.

READ MORE: Mayor calls on community to celebrate International Women’s Day

Bearing that in mind, the struggle for equality is not just about enlightening men but also about flinging off our own blinkers to belief in our own self-worth, strength and equal rights as human beings.

We may have tackled glaring issues, but the subtleties of women’s issues today make the movement for women’s rights as elusive as ever if the bleak statistics gathered from data in 75 countries (80 per cent of the world’s population) are to be believed.