Gender gap chasm will take more than a lifetime to close

THE World Economic Forum has warned that it will take many years to close the gender gap.

According to the forum, this year alone, indicators showed that the time it would take to reduce the gender gap had narrowed to 99.5 years.

These shocking revelations come as the global organisation released statistics yesterday around gender parity as part of its 2020 Global Gender Gap Report.

“While an improvement (was made in) 2018 – when the gap was calculated to take 108 years to close – it still means parity between men and women across health, education, work and politics will take more than a lifetime to achieve,” it said.

According to the report, the improvement in 2019 could largely be ascribed to a significant increase in the number of women in politics.

It said this year, across the world, women now held 25.2% of parliamentary lower-house seats and 21.2% of ministerial positions, compared to 24.1% and 19% respectively in 2018.

“Politics, however, remains the area where the least progress has been made to date. With educational attainment and health and survival much closer to parity on 96.1% and 95.7% respectively, the other major battlefield is economic participation.

“Here, the gap widened in 2019 from 58.1% in 2018 to 57.8%. Looking simply at the progress that has been made since 2006, when the World Economic Forum first began measuring the gender gap, this economic gender gap will take 257 years to close, compared to 202 years last year.”

The report further attributes the economic gender gap to a number of factors, saying these included the “stubbornly low levels of women in managerial or leadership positions, wage stagnation, labour force participation and income. Women have been hit by a triple whammy. First, they are more highly represented in many of the roles that have been hit hardest by automation, for example, retail and white-collar clerical roles.”

With the introduction of the 4th Industrial Revolution, the report also looked at gender inequality in jobs of the future.

It pointed out that the greatest challenge preventing the economic gender gap from closing was the representation of women in emerging roles.

It said new analysis conducted in partnership with LinkedIn showed that women were, on average, heavily under-represented in most emerging professions.

“This gap is most pronounced across our cloud computing job cluster, where only 12% of all professionals are women. The situation is hardly better in engineering (15%).

“...However, women do outnumber men in two fast-growing job clusters: content production and people and culture”.

Nordic countries that have been praised for their continued efforts to lead the way to gender parity include Iceland, which remains the world’s most gender-equal country at 87.7%, followed by Norway at 84.2%, Finland at 83.2% and Sweden at 82.0%.

The report indicated that the sub-Saharan region had closed 68.0% of its gender gap and that it was home of one of the top-ten countries overall, Rwanda.