Gender Equality to Take 120 Years Even as Gap Narrows, WEF Says

(Bloomberg) — Global gender parity remains more than a lifetime away for women even though the gap with men is now smaller than ever, according to the World Economic Forum.

The Geneva-based organization’s annual report on the matter, released on Wednesday, found that current progress means it will still take 120 years to reach full equality. That’s a marked improvement, and up from 170 years measured a decade ago, but it still means that no-one alive today is likely to experience it.

The WEF’s report combines indexes of political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, health and survival and educational attainment to assess gender disparity across the world. The overall gap across 145 economies has narrowed to 69.4%, the best result recorded in two decades of such reports.

“Gender parity is achievable — economies at every income level have made progress, so the barrier is not a lack of resources,” said Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the WEF. “To accelerate, governments and employers need to learn from the policies that work and apply them faster.”

The category gaining the most ground in the last 20 years is political empowerment — even as parity there is almost two centuries away. There is now one female minister for every 4.3 male peers, up from 8.1 in 2006.

In parliaments, the ratio has moved from one woman for every 5.6 men to every three or so.

Politics is also the dimension showing the clearest signs of reversal, scoring lower than it did in 2016. The number of female heads of state peaked in 2022, the highest in half a century, and has since fallen back.

Women have advanced in other leadership roles. Within the C-suite, they hold 19% of chief executive officer positions and around a quarter of chief financial officer and chief operating officer jobs.

Even so, women remain particularly underrepresented in the most powerful corporate roles. They hold fewer than a fifth of those that typically lead to top jobs, while dominating positions such as chief human resources officer and chief people officer.

And within artificial intelligence, women remain in a minority at every level. Fewer than one in five AI engineers are female, and they are more concentrated in data annotation roles, which often pay less than engineering jobs.

“Progress toward gender parity in leadership has stalled for a fourth year,” said Sue Duke, managing director for EMEA & Latam and head of global public policy & economic graph at LinkedIn. “Based on the current trajectory, girls born today will not see equal representation at the top in their lifetime. And the issue is even more pronounced for women working in AI roles.”

On a geographical basis, Europe leads in closing the overall gender gap, followed by North America, while the Middle East and North Africa lag. That latter region had a later start but has steadily stepped up efforts to become the most reform-intensive part of the world in the current decade.

Iceland topped the report’s rankings for the 17th consecutive year, with 93% of the gender gap closed. It remains the only country to have eradicated more than 90% of its disparity.

LinkedIn’s Duke highlighted that in times of economic slowdown, there typically is a reversal in women getting leadership roles.

“Every time there is a hit, we will default to old patterns,” she said. “For years in row, women’s roles in leadership has not only stalled, but also gone backwards.”

–With assistance from Chloe Whiteaker.

(Updates with comments from LinkedIn’s Duke in final paragraphs)

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