GENDER EQUALITY AT WORK MORE THAN 200 YEARS AWAY
ROBOTS AND LACK OF CHILDCARE LEAVE WOMEN’S WAGES CENTURIES BEHIND
Global Gender Gap Index 2018 has benchmarked 149 countries on their progress towards gender parity on a scale from 0 (disparity) to 1 (parity) across four thematic dimensions — Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Here are the top 10 countries ensuring equal treatment and pay for women:
Gender inequality is the reality around the world, and we’re seeing that in all aspects of women’s lives.”
Anna-Karin Jatfors, regional director for UN Women
It’s still a long way from reaching a point where women and men are being paid the same for the same job.”
Saadia Zahidi, head of WEF’s Centre for New Economy and
Society
More than ever, societies cannot afford to lose out on the skills, ideas and perspectives of half of humanity.”
Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the WEF
The good news: The global gender gap has improved, slightly. The reality: Differences in economic opportunity, including pay between men and women, are so vast it’ll take 202 years to fully bridge them, according to the World Economic Forum.
The group looks at several measures of equality between men and women in this year’s Global Gender Gap Report, released on Tuesday. Overall gender disparity across politics, work, health and education improved by less than 0.1 per cent, meaning it’ll take 108 years to reach parity. The economic opportunity gap — based on participation, pay and advancement in the workforce — remains the area that’ll take the longest time to close.
The figures are a tiny improvement from last year’s results, where the gap between the achievements and well-being of men and women widened for the first time in more than a decade.
“What we’re seeing globally is that we don’t have any country that’s achieved gender equality, regardless of level of development, region or type of economy. Gender inequality is the reality around the world, and we’re seeing that in all aspects of women’s lives,” said Anna-Karin Jatfors, regional director for UN Women. She added that “202 years is too long a wait” for economic equity.
Jatfors said governments can help spur improvements with equal-pay policies and investment in parental and elder care infrastructure,
and by allowing women legal protections including job security during pregnancy.
There’s been “minimal progress” since last year’s report in measuring economic participation and opportunity, the WEF said, with the worst-performing countries mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. Only 34 per cent of global managers are women, and income gaps have been “particularly persistent,’ with 63 percent of the global wage gap having closed so far.
Child care
There were fewer women working this year than men, mostly due to the lack of childcare which kept women from jobs or from progressing to senior roles, according to the annual index ranking 149 countries on their progress to close the gender gap.
“Most economies still have not made much progress in providing better infrastructure for childcare,” said Zahidi in a phone interview.
“This continues to be a major source of why women don’t enter the labour market at all or aren’t able to progress as much as they should given the talent that they have,” she added.
Women were missing at the top, the report found, with only a third of all managerial roles taken by women. There were also just 17 female heads of state this year, with women occupying 18 percent of ministerial positions and 24 percent of parliamentary roles globally, it added.
Robot takeover
Zahidi warned that emerging technology like robots and artificial intelligence (AI) were also taking jobs traditionally occupied by women, including administration, customer service and telemarketing.
“While a lot of the narrative in the past tended to focus on men in blue collar work in factories, there are a lot of women in blue collar or service work that are also being displaced — and that trend is starting to become more marked,” she said.
The WEF report found that only 22 per cent of people working in AI worldwide were female.
According to a 2017 study by the Brookings Institution, a US think tank, the use of digital tools has increased in 517 of 545 occupations since 2002 in the United States alone, with a striking uptick in many lower-skilled occupations.
As technology advances, experts say women and girls with poor digital skills will be the hardest hit and will struggle to find jobs.
Although the number of women in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) has increased in recent years, they still only account for about 30 per cent of the world’s researchers, the UN cultural agency Unesco says.
Iceland tops
Iceland was the best performer on the list for the 10th year running. It also remained No. 1 for women’s political empowerment, although
it slid in female representation among legislators, senior officials and managers. In October, Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir was among scores of Icelandic women who walked out of their workplaces to protest wage inequality and sexual harassment. Other nations with female leaders -- New Zealand and the UK — finished seventh and 15th.
In Asia, the Philippines edged its way into eighth place on the overall global index. As such, it was the best performer in Asia, boosted by gender equality in education, politics and an improvement in wage
equity. The country is far ahead of the continent’s next best performer — Laos at 26th. Singapore ranked 67th and China was 103th, coming in last globally in women’s health.
Political empowerment is where the gender gap remains the widest, according to the findings. The US fell to the 98th spot for the measure, sliding from 66th in 2006. Still, in the midterm elections last month, which took place after the survey data was collected, women won a record 102 seats in the US House as of Nov. 19, fueled by Democratic opposition to President Donald Trump.
Progress in political empowerment in the West has been slightly reduced, with the gap of women in parliament in 22 Western countries being 41 per cent. Yet improvement is being made in the rest of the world.
Warning ahead
A new sector for gender imbalance is emerging, according to the report. The gap in artificial intelligence is three times larger than in other industries, according to an analysis conducted by WEF and LinkedIn. Women with AI skills are more likely to be employed as
data analysts and information managers, while men tend to land in more lucrative and senior positions such as engineering heads and chief executives.
A number of factors are at play here, the report said, including automation affecting jobs typically done by women and fewer women entering high-growth employment areas such as information technology.
“In an era when human skills are increasingly important and complementary to technology, the world cannot afford to deprive itself of women’s talent in sectors in which talent is already scarce,” said Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the WEF.
In this area, Singapore, Italy and South Africa outperformed others. Women made up 28 per cent of the AI workforce in all three countries, for the highest percentage among 20 economies surveyed this year using LinkedIn data.
Meanwhile Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria were the worst performing countries.
Last year, WEF said women would achieve economic equality in 217 years, the widest gap in almost a decade.
—
In addition to being outnumbered three to one, women in AI are less likely to be positioned in senior roles.”
WEF statement