Gender inequality widening after decade of progress: WEF

A decade of slow progress towards better parity between the sexes has screeched to a halt, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said today, warning the global gender gap was now widening.

In recent years, women have made significant progress towards equality in a number of areas such as education and health, with the Nordic countries leading the fray.

But the global trend now seems to have made a U-turn, especially in workplaces, where full gender equality is not expected to materialise until 2234, WEF said in a report.

“A decade of slow but steady progress on improving parity between the sexes came to a halt in 2017, with the global gender gap widening for the first time since the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report was first published in 2006,” it said.

The Geneva-based organisation’s annual report tracks the disparities between the sexes in four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment. A year ago WEF estimated that it would take 83 years to close the remaining gap.

But since then women’s steady advances in the areas of education, health and political representation have plateaued, and for the fourth year running, equality in the workplace has slipped further from view.

Today’s report said that at the current rate of progress, it would now take a full 100 years on average to achieve overall gender equality.

The estimated time needed to ensure full equality in the workplace meanwhile has jumped from 80 years in 2014 to 170 years last year to 217 years now, according to the report.

“In 2017, we should not be seeing progress towards gender parity shift into reverse,” Saadia Zahidi, WEF head of education, gender and work, said in a statement.

Not all bleak

Even more than in the workplace, political participation stubbornly lagged behind, with women still accounting for just 23 percent of the world’s decision makers, according to the report. But political representation is also the area where women have made the most advances in recent years, the report said, estimating it will take 99 years to fully rectify the situation.

The picture is not all bleak: the march towards gender equality in education could reach the finish line within a mere 13 years, it said.

And the situation varies greatly in different countries and regions. For instance, while Western European countries could close their gender gaps within 61 years, countries in the Middle East and North Africa will take 157 years, the report estimated.

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