Everything you need to know about the gender gap in 2020

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. This is the finding of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020, published today.

According to the report, this year’s improvement can largely be ascribed to a significant increase in the number of women in politics. The political gender gap will take 95 years to close, compared to 107 years last year. 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.

Politics, however, remains the area where 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.

Economic Gap Widening

The report attributes the economic gender gap to a number of factors. These include 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.

Second, not enough women are entering those professions –often but not exclusively technology-driven –where wage growth has been the most pronounced. As a result, women in work too often find themselves in middle-low wage categories that have been stagnant since the financial crisis 10 years ago.

Third, perennial factors such as lack of care infrastructure and lack of access to capital strongly limit women’s workforce opportunities. Women spend at least twice as much time on care and voluntary work in every country where data is available, and lack of access to capital prevents women from pursuing entrepreneurial activity, another key driver of income.

“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.This is why the World Economic Forum is working with business and government stakeholders to accelerate efforts to close the gender gap,”said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.

Could the “Role Model Effect” close the gender gap?

One positive development is the possibility that a “role model effect” may be starting to have an impact in terms of leadership and possibly also wages. For example, in eight of the top 10 countries this year, high political empowerment corresponds with high numbers of women in senior roles.Comparing changes in political empowerment from 2006 to 2019 shows that improvements in political representation occurred simultaneously with improvements in women in senior roles in the labour market.

While this is a correlation, not a causation, in OECD countries, where women have been in leadership roles for relatively longer and social norms started to change earlier, role model effects could contribute to shaping labour market outcomes.

Gender Inequality in the Jobs of the Future

Possibly the greatest challenge preventing the economic gender gap from closing is women’s under-representation in emerging roles. New analysis conducted in partnership with LinkedIn shows that women are,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%) and “Data and AI” (26%), however women do outnumber men in two fast-growing job clusters, “content production” and “people and culture”.

According to our data, this reality presents leaders intent on addressing the gender gap in the future with two key challenges. The first and most obvious challenge is that more must be done to equip women with the skills to perform the most in-demand jobs. Indeed,there is an economic cost of not doing so as skills shortages in these professions hold back economic growth.

The second is possibly more complex. According to our data, even where women have the relevant in-demand skill set they are not always equally represented. In data science, for example,31% of those with the relevant skill set are women even though only 25% of roles are held by women. Likewise, there is no gender gap in terms of skills when it comes to digital specialists, however only 41%of these jobs are performed by women.

These facts point to three key strategies that must be followed to hard wire gender equality into future work forces: to ensure women are equipped in the first place –either through skilling or reskilling –with disruptive technical skills;to follow-up by enhancing diverse hiring;and to create inclusive work cultures.

“Insights from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph can help policymakers, business leaders, and educators understand and prepare for how women will be represented in the future workforce. Our data shows that meaningful action is needed to build the systems and talent pipelines required to close the gender gap in tech and ensure women have an equal role in building the future,”said Allen Blue, Co-Founder and Vice-President, Product Strategy, LinkedIn.

What the Forum is Doing to Close the Gender Gap

The World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society aims to close economic gender gaps through both in-country and global industry work. Through Closing the Gender Gap Accelerators, the Forum drives change by setting up action coalitions between relevant ministries and the largest employers in the country to increase female labour force participation, the number of women in leadership positions, closing wage gaps and preparing women for jobs of the future. Additionally,the global business commitment on Hardwiring Gender Parity in the Future of Work mobilizes businesses to commit to hiring 50% women for their five highest growth roles between now and 2022. Finally, the Forum has committed to at least double the current percentage of women participants at the Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, by 2030.

“To get to parity in the next decade instead of the next two centuries, we will need to mobilize resources, focus leadership attention and commit to targets across the public and private sectors. Business-as-usual will not close the gender gap –we must take action to achieve the virtuous cycle that parity creates in economies and societies,” said Saadia Zahidi, Head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society and Member of the Managing Board, World Economic Forum.

The Global Gender Gap in 2020

Nordic countries continue to lead the way to gender parity. Iceland(87.7%)remains the world’s most gender-equal country, followed by Norway(2nd, 84.2%), Finland(3rd, 83.2%) and Sweden(4th, 82.0%).Other economies in the top 10 include Nicaragua(5th, 80.4%), New Zealand(6th, 79.9%), Ireland(7th, 79.8%), Spain(8th, 79.5%),Rwanda (9th, 79.1%) and Germany(10th, 78.7%).

Among the countries that improve the most this year are Spain in Western Europe, Ethiopia in Africa, Mexico in Latin America, and Georgia in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. These countries all improved their positions in the ranking by more than 20 places, largely driven by improvements in the political empowerment dimension.

Western Europe is the best performing region for the 14th consecutive year. With an average score of 76.7% (out of 100), the region has now closed 77% of its gender gap, further improving from last edition. At the current pace, it will take 54 years to close the gap in Western Europe. The region is home to the four most gender-equal countries in the world, namely in order Iceland (87.7%), Norway (84.2%) and Finland (83.2%) and Sweden (82.0%), and one country (Spain, 8th) is among the most improved countries this year.

The North America region regroups the United States (72.4%, 53rd) and Canada (77.2%, 19th). Both countries’ performances are stalling, especially in terms of economic participation and opportunity. At this rate it will take 151 years to close the gap.

The Eastern Europe and Central Asia region has closed 71.5% of its gender gap so far with a slight improvement since last year. To date the time to fully close its overall gender gap is estimated to be 107 years. The region has fully closed its educational gap and has improved women’s political empowerment which however remains only closed at 15%. 21 of the 26 countries in this region have closed at least 70% and the top-ranked country, Latvia, 11th has closed 78.5% of its gap.

The Latin America and the Caribbean region has closed 72.1% of its gender gap so far, progressing 1 percentage points since last year. At this rate it will take 59 years to close the gender gap. The most noticeable improvement is on the Political empowerment dimension where the region closes its gap by 5 percentage points. Led my Nicaragua that has closed 80.4% of its gap (5th), 15 of the 24 countries covered by the report have improved their overall scores. Among the most improved countries, Mexico reduced its gender gap by 3.4 points on a year-over-year basis.

The Sub-Saharan Africa region has closed 68.0% of its gender gap so far. This result is a significant progress since last edition which leads to revise down the number of years it will take to close the gender gap, which is now estimated at 95 years. The region is home of one of the top-ten countries overall Rwanda (9th) while another 21 countries have improved their performances since last year, including Ethiopia (82nd) one of the best improved this year globally.

The East Asia and Pacific Region has closed 69% of the overall gender gap. If the region maintains the same rate of improvement as the 2006-2019 period, and given the current gap, it will take another 163 years to close the gender gap, the most time of any region. The region has improved on three of the four gender gap dimensions and has been the only region where political empowerment gap has widened (16% closed so far). The best performing country is New Zealand 6th, which has closed 79.9% of its gap. It is followed by the Philippines 16th with 78.1% closed and Lao PDR, 43rd with a score of 73.1%.

South Asia region has closed two thirds of its gender gap. The region’s gender gap is the second largest despite a progress of 6 points over the past 14 years. If the rate of progress of the past 15 years was to continue it will take 71 years to close the region’s gender gap. However, in contrast with the overall’s performance, the region’s Economic participation and opportunity gap widens this year. Bangladesh (50th) leads the region, while the second ranked country, Nepal, lags several positions behind (101th).

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region obtains the lowest score (61.1%) despite having narrowed its gap by 0.5 points since last year. Assuming the same rate of progress going forward it will take approximately 150 years to close the gender gap in the MENA region. The two most highly ranked countries in the region are Israel(64th) with a closed gap to date of 71.8% and the United Arab Emirates (120th) with a score of 65.5%. 15 of the 19 countries in this region rank 130th or lower.

Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society

The Global Gender Gap Report is a flagship publication of the World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society. The Platform provides the opportunity to advancing prosperous, inclusive and equitable economies and societies. It focuses on co-creating a new vision in three interconnected areas: growth and competitiveness; education, skills and work; and equality and inclusion. Working together, stakeholders deepen their understanding of complex issues, shape new models and standards and drive scalable, collaborative action for systemic change.

Over 100 of the world’s leading companies and 100 international, civil society and academic organizations currently work through the Platform to promote new approaches to competitiveness in the Fourth Industrial Revolution economy; deploy education and skills for tomorrow’s workforce; build a new pro-worker and pro-business agenda for jobs; and integrate equality and inclusion into the new economy, aiming to reach 1 billion people with improved economic opportunities.