It’s getting harder to be a woman.
That’s the conclusion of a new study on the Global Gender Gap from the World Economic Forum. The annual review looks at 142 countries, and evaluates women’s standing in the world based on four indexes: educational attainment, health, political empowerment and economic participation.
The good news: worldwide, men and women are going to school at about the same rate. And their health outcomes are about as good as the health outcomes of men. But women are not nearly as well represented in government, and the gap in economic participation is only widening. In 74 countries, things have gotten worse since last year. According to the report, “an average gap of 31.7 percent remains to be closed worldwide across the four Index dimensions in order to achieve universal gender parity.”
Closing the economic gap remains the biggest challenge for several reasons. More women than ever are working, but they’re still responsible for the bulk of the household chores and caregiving for both children and the elderly. Men do, on average, about 34 percent of the unpaid work that women do. And it’s a gap that starts early — girls worldwide spend about 30 percent more of their time on unpaid work. This limits women’s ability to earn as much money as men and to grow in their profession, even as they work about an hour longer each day than men do.
If things continue at their current rate, it’ll take another 170 years to reach gender equity, the authors say. But one bright spot: Based on current trends, the education-specific gender gap could be reduced to parity within the next 10 years.
The United States ranks 45th, thanks primarily to two factors: the number of women in the workforce has stagnated in recent years, and women still don’t hold nearly as many political positions as men. The country has reached gender parity in education.
