Women say equal pay still seems further off

The United Nations first recognized International Women’s Day in 1975, sparking 38 years of annual demonstrations, private and public proclamations and a general recognition that even in the modern era, gender equality has a long way to go.

More recently, International Women’s Day has been an opportunity to consider how much has changed, which is especially apt in 2018 as the #MeToo movement continues to expose sexual harassment and misconduct to public scrutiny.

Nevertheless, this year’s slew of reports are sobering as they suggest more than a little backsliding for women’s economic empowerment and for women in business.

The World Economic Forum now estimates global pay parity is a century away, an increase from about 80 years in 2016 — in part because the path for women to the most highly paid jobs is less clear. Executive teams globally slipped to being just 24 percent women from 25 percent in the most recent year, according to Grant Thornton. And among new CEO hires globally, less than 4 percent went to women in 2016, professional services firm PwC said.

In the U.S. and in the U.K., there’s even more bad news. The number of women CEOs at the largest U.S. companies will slip to 24 from 27, according to Catalyst, which tracks diversity in companies. Among the 92 largest companies in the U.K., 6.5 percent had women CEOs, a dip from 7.8 percent in 2016, according to executive recruiter Egon Zehnder.

Contributing to the nowcentury long wait women have for pay equality, progress to close that gap over the last 10 years fell to the slowest since weekly earnings data was first compiled in 1979, and is half as much as it was in the previous 10 years, according to data released this week by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

There is some slightly better news, though. Equality in the boardroom might be possible by 2048 in the U.S., according to researcher Equilar. The number of new directors being appointed to boards who are women might hit 50 percent by 2032, per executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles. But even a less ambitious goal of 30 percent women on boards of a select group of larger companies isn’t likely before 2028, according to researcher MSCI.

Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, warns that these numbers are only a snapshot in time, and not necessarily a prediction of the future pace forward, or backward. “The focus on numbers doesn’t tell you how much you should care about this in the first place and, if you do care about it, what it is you should do about it,” he said. “There’s no reason in particular to expect the future will be exactly like the past.”

Getty Images The World Economic Forum now estimates global pay parity is a century away in part because the path for women to the most highly paid jobs is less clear.