The Gender Wage Gap continues to hamper the economic participation of women Image Courtesy

 Global Gender Gap Report 2021

It will now take the world 135 years to achieve Gender Equality owing to the gendered implications of the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, 2021 covid-19 has pushed the Gender Gap by 36 more years, to 135.6 years up from the 99.5 years recorded in the previous report.

“Preliminary evidence suggests that the health emergency and the related economic downturn have impacted women more severely than men, partially re-opening gaps that had already been closed,” the report says.

The Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks the evolution of gender-based gaps among four key dimensions; Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment and tracks progress towards closing these gaps.

Political Gender Gap

The gender gap in Political Empowerment is reported to be the largest of the four gaps highlighted in the Global Gender Gap Index, saying at the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.

The political gender gap in the 156 countries sampled in the report has only been closed by 22% to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points.

“Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 parliament seats and just 22.6% of over 3,400 ministers worldwide”.

 Economic Participation

 The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity is the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked in the Global Gender Gap index.

So far, 58% of this gap has been closed and the report projects that it will take another 267.6 years to close.

The report attributes the slow progress in closing the economic gender gap on key among other things; income disparities and lack of women in leadership positions. ( women representing just 27% of all manager positions).

The report however acknowledges that there is a notable increase in the proportion of women among skilled professionals and some progress towards wage equality, although it’s at a slow pace.

Education and Health

The global gender gaps in Education and health attainment is nearly closed at 95% and 96% respectively.

According to the global gender index, it will take another 14 years to completely close this gap.

“For both education and health, while progress is higher than for economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic, as well as continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity”.