Global gender gap is closing, but parity is more than 100 years away, report says
Global gender gap is closing, but parity is more than 100 years away, report says
The gender gap around the world is closing, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum. That’s the good news.
The bad news?
At the current rate of progress, it’s going to take another 131 years to close it completely. Wait, what?
The World Economic Forum report covers a range of factors, including women’s labor force participation, wages and access to positions of power. And by that measure, the worst country in the world for women right now is Afghanistan.
Not only does it rank dead last, it also backslid, said WEF Managing Director Saadia Zahidi.
“Afghanistan has closed just over 40% of the gender gap, so essentially, women have less than half of the opportunities and resources that men have,” she said.
Some advanced economies lost ground too. Take Japan, which Zahidi said has invested in trying to improve the status of women, “but remains very stuck when it comes to ensuring that they’re actually getting the return on that investment.”
What unites many countries, rich or poor, where gender parity has languished is a lack of child and elder care infrastructure that allows mothers to balance work and family.
“It’s extremely important because it puts a limit on what women can do in the labor market,” said Anne York, an economics professor at Meredith College. The last three years in the United States, when so many women left the workforce, haven’t helped, she said.
“The pandemic, unfortunately, has made things a lot worse than they would have been,” York said.
No country on the planet has achieved gender parity, the WEF report said, but Iceland, Norway and Finland are getting close. The U.S. ranks 43rd.
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said even as women try to educate themselves out of the pay gap, “the average wage for women with advanced degrees is still lower than the average wage for men with only a college degree.”
Meanwhile, the WEF finds globally that it’ll be the year 2154 before genders are on equal footing.
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