WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2020

Mind the 100 Year Gap

The World Economic Forum published the Global Gender Gap Report 2020. It reveals that gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years.

This is the 14th year of the report and the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 benchmarks 153 countries on their progress towards gender parity in four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment. In addition, this year’s report examines gender gap prospects in the professions of the future.

The report argues that

• Gender parity matters and outlines why.
• Political representation is on the rise and
• Role models have an impact on leadership and wages but
• Women’s participation in the labour market has stalled and financial disparities are increasing.

Overall parity in education is improving with 40 countries achieving gender parity of the 153 benchmarked countries. It is forecast to take 12 years to reach gender parity in education. However parity in economic participation and opportunity is deteriorating to 57.8%, which in time represents a massive 257 years before gender parity can be achieved.

The report identifies greatest challenge to closing the economic gender gap is women’s under-representation in emerging roles. In cloud computing, just 12% of professionals are women. Similarly, in engineering and Data and AI, the numbers are 15% and 26% respectively.

Ireland is in the top ten with a score of 0.798 and has improved 2 places since 2006. It is one of the Western European countries that may take 54 years to achieve gender parity. The Ireland country scores are on pages 193-194 of the full report.

World Economic Forum. (2019). The Global Gender Gap Report 2020. Geneva: World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/reports/gender-gap-2020-report-100-years-pay-equality#report-nav