By Ambereen Choudhury
(Bloomberg) — Women today are being paid the average wage men earned almost a decade ago, and it will take 118 years before men and women earn equal pay at the current rate of convergence, according to a World Economic Forum report.
Some 250 million women have entered the workforce since 2006, according to the WEF Global Gender Gap report released on Thursday.
“More women than men are enrolled in universities in nearly 100 countries, but women hold the majority of senior roles in only a handful of countries,” Saadia Zahidi, head of the Global Challenge on Gender Parity at the WEF, said in the statement. “Companies and governments need to implement new policies to prevent this continued loss of talent and instead leverage it for boosting growth and competitiveness.”
The WEF is best known for its annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, which attracts heads of government and corporations to the Alpine resort every January. The WEF has backed the forum as a place to give women a voice.
The report measured the gender gap in 145 nations by measuring factors including economic opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health. Nordic countries retained the top four spots they held last year, led by Iceland, while the U.S. was ranked 28th, down eight places from 2014, on “slightly less perceived wage equality for similar work and changes in ministerial level positions.”
The U.K.’s global ranking rose to 18th from 26th last year, though it is down from 9th in 2006, the first year the WEF published the gender-gap report.
More than 80 percent of the countries examined made progress on labor force participation, with Nepal posting the largest increase, the report said. Countries with the strongest growth include Botswana, Nigeria, Spain, Nicaragua, South Africa and Lesotho. The largest gains for women in senior political and managerial roles were in Colombia, Ghana and France. Lesotho, Albania and Guatemala had the most improvement in high-skilled professional and technical roles, the report said.
From the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report for 2015 shows an improvement globally, while South Africa has climbed one place to 17th.
According to the data, South Africa has been in the top twenty for nine of the past 10 years. The improvement is primarily down to progress in the Economic Participation and Opportunity pillar, where it climbs 11 places to 72.
Overall, the country has closed its gender gap in three of four indicators (economy, health and politics) over the past ten years although only by half a percentage point.
While it has closed its Health and Survival gap fully, it has regressed slightly in terms of Educational Attainment over the past ten years.
For the fourth pillar, Political Empowerment, South Africa ranks 14th worldwide mainly due to high scores for both the Women in Parliament and Women in Ministerial Positions indicators: this ranking, however, is the lowest it has held in the past decade, suggesting other countries are closing their political gender gap quicker.
Other key points from the report are:
- South Africa’s global ranking in 2006 was 18th out of 115 countries compared to 17th today from 145
- Worldwide, the gender gap across all pillars (economy, politics, health & education) has closed by 4% since 2006
- The economic gap has only closed by 3%, with progress towards wage equality and labor force parity stalling markedly since 2009/2010. At the current rate, the economic gap will not close until 2133
- In education, big progress has been made in further education (women now make up the majority of enrolled university students in 97 countries), but women make up the majority of skilled workers in only 68 countries and the majority of leaders in only four.
- The education gap has widened or stayed the same in 24 countries over the past ten years
- The pillar of our study where most progress has been made is political empowerment, which has closed from 14% to 23% in the past ten years. There are now four countries where women hold an equal number of ministerial positions as men and two countries with parity in parliament
The South African report:
The Full Global Report:
