Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty
For women hoping that the gender pay gap will soon come to a close, “soon” might mean nearly three more centuries.
The World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gapreportfor 2020, and found that the gap won’t even out for another 257 years due to a “lack of progress” in closing the economic participation and opportunity gap.
The report looked at 153 different countries and ranked each one on four key dimensions, including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
It did note, however, that when looking only at the 107 countries which have been covered each year since the report’s inception, the gap would take 99.5 years to close.
The U.S. ranked 53rd on the list of most gender-equal countries, falling two places this year, and the report said it has only closed 69.9 percent of its wage gap and 65.6 percent of its income gap so far.
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It also found that American women still struggle to “enter the very top business positions” in the workplace, and that only 21.7 percent of corporate managing board members are women.
Gender gaps in North America specifically can potentially be closed in 151 years, according to the report — and while that’s significantly lower than the world average, it’s still nearly 100 years more than the estimate listed for Western Europe, which is just 54 years.
Iceland was deemed the most gender-equal country in the world for the 11th year in a row, having closed 88 percent of its overall gender gap. Other countries that are especially gender-equal are Norway, Finland, Sweden, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Rwanda and Germany.
The report concluded with a list of steps countries can take to improve their statistics, including increasing female labor force participation, increasing the number of women in leadership positions, closing gaps in wage and remuneration and building parity in “emerging high-demand skills and jobs.”
source: people.com
