A gap too large to bridge?

The latest data revealed in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 shows men and women will have pay equality in 257 years, 55 more years than the estimate in the previous edition showing the massive challenge that still lies to provide 50% of the world’s population with equal opportunities.  

While the overall gender gap across politics, education, health and work has narrowed, the latest figures show the economic gender gap has widened – though it’s still better than it was in 2006 when the World Economic Forum began measuring the global gender gap.

Although the report finds a 2% increase in the number of women in senior roles, it says women’s participation in the labour market is stalling and financial disparities are growing, which explains the widening of the economic gap.

Currently, only 55% of adult women are in the labour market, compared to 78% of men. Meanwhile, more than 40% of the wage gap and 50% of the income gap still need to be closed. Worldwide, the average woman’s annual income is $ 11,500, versus $ 21,500 for a man. To make matters worse, in many countries a lack of access to capital, land or financial products prevent women from making a living. 

There are many factors behind the disparity in earnings and career opportunities. They include women choosing lower-paid occupations, working part-time, the “motherhood penalty,” doing most of the childcare and household chores and, not least, discrimination and bias.

In the rapidly changing world of work, another major obstacle to closing the economic gender gap is the under-representation of women in the most in-demand occupations. Based on a new analysis produced in collaboration with LinkedIn, the report looks at emerging gaps at what it calls “the frontiers of the new economy,” where employment and wage growth are rising rapidly.

Here, women outnumber men in just two of eight job clusters, “content production” and “people and culture.” Only 12% of professionals in “cloud computing” are women, 15% in “engineering” and 26% in “data and artificial intelligence.”

In order to tackle the economic gender gap, leaders will need to do more to equip women for the professions of the future, through continuous upskilling or reskilling, along with diversifying hiring and creating inclusive work cultures.

Supporting gender parity is critical to ensuring strong, cohesive and resilient societies around the world. For business, too, diversity will be an essential element to demonstrate that stakeholder capitalism is the guiding principle.

Perhaps one glimmer of hopes comes from politics. The time it will take to close the gender gap narrowed to 99.5 years in 2019. While an improvement on 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. 

Worldwide in 2019, women now hold 25.2% of parliamentary lower-house seats and 21.2% of ministerial positions, compared to 24.1% and 19% respectively last year. This is the best opportunity to change laws and regulations to provide systemic support so other major issues such as the pay gap can be closed in a shorter space of time. The data is clear, only more women in key positions will solve problems faced by women.