Women could have to wait more than two centuries for equality at work, according to a report released yesterday showing gender inequality growing in workplaces worldwide despite increasing demands for equal treatment.
While women appear to be gradually closing the gender gap in areas such as politics, health and education, workplace inequality is not expected to be erased until the year 2276, the World Economic Forum (WEF) report said.
The organization, which gathers the global elite in the plush Swiss ski resort of Davos each year, said that the worldwide gender gap in the workplace had widened further since last year, when parity appeared to be only 202 years off.
The Geneva-based organization’s annual report tracks disparities between the sexes in 153 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.
The overall gender gap across these categories has shrunk, the report showed, with WEF now forecasting it would take 99.5 years for women to achieve parity on average, down from the 108 years forecast in last year’s report.
Yet while some sectors have shown improvements, others lag far behind.
General parity “will take more than a lifetime to achieve,” WEF said in a statement.
The gender gap was more than 96 percent closed in the area of education and could be eliminated altogether within just 12 years, WEF said.
The gap was equally small in the health and survival category, but the WEF report said it remained unclear how long it would take to achieve full parity in this domain due to lingering issues in populous countries such as China and India.
Politics meanwhile is the domain where the least progress has been made to date, but it showed the biggest improvement in the past year.
Women this year held 25.2 percent of parliamentary lower-house seats and 22.1 percent of ministerial positions, compared with 24.1 percent and 19 percent least year respectively.
However, when it comes to the workplace, the picture is less rosy. The report, which looked at a variety of factors including opportunity and pay, said it would take 257 years before there was equality in the workplace.
It highlighted positive developments, such as a general increase in the share of women among skilled workers and senior officials.
Yet it stressed that this trend was counterbalanced by “stagnating or reversing gaps in labor market participation and monetary rewards.”
On average, only 55 percent of adult women are in the labor market today, compared with 78 percent for men, while women globally on average still make 40 percent less than men for similar work in similar positions.
The wage gap has been steadily shrinking in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the past decade.
However, it has at the same time expanded in emerging and developing economies, the report showed.
Progress across the categories varied greatly in different countries and regions.
The report said that while western European countries could close their overall gender gap in 54.4 years, countries in the Middle East and North Africa would take nearly 140 years to do so.
Overall, the Nordic countries once again dominated the top of the table: Men and women were most equal in Iceland, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden.
Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and finally Yemen showed the biggest overall gender gaps of the countries surveyed.
Among the world’s 20 leading economies, Germany fared the best, taking 10th place, followed by France at 15th, South Africa at 17th, Canada at 19th and Britain at 21st.
The US continued its decline, slipping two places to 53rd, with the report pointing out that “American women still struggle to enter the very top business positions,” and are also “under-represented in political leadership roles.”
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