Expert Speak Raisina Debates
Published on Jan 26, 2020
Gender disparity has wide and reverberating impacts across all pillars of society, including significant economic implications.
Claiming space: Women for prosperity

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else. < style="float: none;background-color: #ffffff;color: #333333;cursor: text;font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman','Bitstream Charter',Times,serif;font-size: 16px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0px">— Melinda Gates

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Gap Report, <1> gender parity has reached 68.6% overall. To date, no country has achieved parity. While the gap, currently at 31.4%, certainly shows progress in narrowing, the WEF study also revealed that it could take up to 99.5 years, on average, to close it across the 107 countries that have been covered since the first edition of the study. However, the report also noted that the time to close the overall gap could be extended to as much as 257 years due to the slow rate of change experienced from 2006 to 2020 in closing the gap in economic participation and opportunity. In addition, the projected and overwhelming number of years needed to reach parity is partly due to the fact that while tangible metrics, such as political participation (e.g., elected or appointed seats) and salaries can be tracked, progress against less tangible factors such as sexism and perception towards women, is less clear and appears to continue to lag significantly. Of the 153 countries covered in the 2020 index, women are behind in four major areas, namely political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, and health and survival. The greatest gap (75%) was found in political empowerment with the second greatest gap (42%) found in economic participation and opportunity. These numbers, once again, reveal that while the overall gap may have been narrowed, women continue to be excluded from the key areas necessary to drive development in their countries and the world as a whole. While the educational attainment gap revealed near parity at 4.4%, the study also revealed a disturbing trend: women were greatly underrepresented in the emerging jobs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). For example, in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, the gender gap is alarmingly high, with women accounting for just 22% of professionals in the industry.

The economics of gender disparity

Women make up nearly half of the global population and for this reason, < style="float: none;background-color: #ffffff;color: #333333;cursor: text;font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman','Bitstream Charter',Times,serif;font-size: 16px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0px">gender disparity has wide and reverberating impacts across all pillars of society, including significant economic implications. According to a 2018 report by the World Bank Group, the gender pay gap has resulted in a $160 trillion loss to the global economy. This is a huge and unfathomable loss when one considers the fact that if the gap were closed, global wealth would increase by $23,620 per individual over a lifetime in the 141 countries assessed in the report. The impact of such an increase on global development cannot be overstated, as women — who currently account for just 38% of human capital wealth and in developing countries, one-third or less — would stand to benefit greatly.

Why women matter

We must consider the impact of gender disparity on human advancement. In order to drive forward our economies and transform our societies, balanced contributions from both men and women will be critical. As we move towards the future, marginalising half of the global workforce not only limits the skills, ideas, and perspectives needed to develop our societies, but also eventually further deepens the economic gender gap. With men continuing to outpace women in careers and salaries, they will continue to control financial assets and subsequently in many ways the freedoms of women.

As we move towards the future, marginalising half of the global workforce not only limits the skills, ideas, and perspectives needed to develop our societies, but also eventually further deepens the economic gender gap.

Even more critical is the severity of the 75% political participation gap. According to UN Women, only 24.3% of all national parliamentarians were women as of February 2019. As of June 2019, only 11 women were serving as a Head of State and 12 (and now 13, with Finland’s Sanna Marin’s recent win in December 2019) were serving as a Head of Government. As of February 2019, only three countries (Rwanda, Cuba, and Bolivia) had 50% or more women in parliament. It goes without saying that when women are missing from the seats of power that govern states, policies necessary to protect and empower the most vulnerable amongst us — women and children — will be overlooked. If this persists, families, communities, and economies will continue to fall short of their full potential and aspirations. Another space where women are largely underrepresented is in the workplace. In 2019, only 6.6% of the Fortune 500 companies were led by female CEOs. Again, this is in spite of the fact that companies founded by and led by women have been shown to have up to a 35% higher return on investment. <2> While it cannot categorically be stated that simply appointing a woman to an executive or political role will result in positive financial returns or improved polices, studies have shown that overall, women score higher than men in most leadership skills. According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, women scored higher than men in areas such as initiative, resilience, self-development, integrity and honesty, championing change, collaboration and teamwork, and building relationships. <3>

The way forward

While the period needed to achieve gender parity appears long and overwhelming, concerted and deliberate efforts directed by states can drive significant progress and lessen the time necessary to achieve equality. An extraordinary example of this is Rwanda, where in the 1990s, women made up just 18% of the country’s parliament. In 2003, nearly a decade following the Rwandan genocide, the country’s constitution introduced a gender quota of 30% for female parliament members. Currently, women make up 62% of elected posts, the highest in the world. Similarly, in 2018 the state of California in the United States passed a law <4> mandating all publicly traded companies in the state to have at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019. It further requires companies with five directors on its board to ensure that at least two of those five should be women, and companies with six or more directors to ensure that at least three of them are women by the end of 2021. While stronger laws exist in many European countries (e.g., Norway requires large companies to have up to 40% female representation on their boards), this law is the first of its kind in the United States and hopefully a signal of more such positive change to come. In terms of increasing economic participation and opportunity, states and NGOs can drive similar change by focusing on initiatives that drive wealth creation instead of poverty alleviation. Policies, programmes, and tools that increase the financial inclusion of women and provide access to much-needed capital can greatly reduce the 42% gap that currently exists. Additionally, concentrated efforts must be made to increase the participation of young girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM education). A study by < style="float: none;background-color: #ffffff;color: #333333;cursor: text;font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman','Bitstream Charter',Times,serif;font-size: 16px;font-style: normal;font-variant: normal;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: normal;text-align: left;text-decoration: none;text-indent: 0px">National Girls Collaborative Project found that women in the US — a key global player — accounted for just 18% of computer science degrees. <5> To ensure sustainable development in the age of 4IR, governments must support and/or establish educational institutions that teach and promote technology skills, as well as specifically target young girls and women to build a robust and diverse pipeline of qualified workers for the future.

As individuals, we must also bear the responsibility of doing our part to close these gaps. This means being aware of our own implicit biases that might slow or halt the progress of women around us.

Last but not least, as individuals, we must also bear the responsibility of doing our part to close these gaps. This means being aware of our own implicit biases that might slow or halt the progress of women around us. An example might be unconsciously overlooking a woman for a technical role, promotion, or raise in favour of a similarly or less qualified male counterpart. For example, in the startup ecosystem, it is a well-known fact that women-led companies receive just 2% of venture capital dollars globally in spite of delivering twice as much per dollar invested as compared to those founded by men. According to a 2018 study, this lack of funding is due to, among other things, female founders “being subject to more pushback during pitch presentations than men, particularly on technical aspects of their ventures,” being penalised for making more realistic and conservative business projections, and for presenting businesses targeted towards women, to which the male dominated investor industry is less likely to relate. <6> As we continue to tackle global development issues, we must acknowledge and take conscious and deliberate steps to address gender disparity: the failure to do so is a failure to enable a significant source of solutions we seek in order to address current and future challenges. As we do this, we must also remember that gender equality is not just about empowering women and girls, but rather about ensuring the sustainable growth and advancement of a world that serves all of its citizens.
<1> WEF, “Global Gender Gap Report 2020”. <2> Katie Abouzahr, Frances Brookes Taplett, Matt Krentz, and John Harthorne, “Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet”, BCG, June 6, 2018. <3> Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, “Research: Women Score Higher Than Men in Most Leadership Skills”, Harvard Business Review, June 25, 2019. <4> See for details: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-california-law-mandates-female-representation-boards-directorsdecember-2019 <5> National Girls Collaborative Project. <6> See note 2.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.

Contributor

OLUWATOSIN DUROTOYE

OLUWATOSIN DUROTOYE

Oluwatosin Durotoye is the chief operating officer of FilmoRealty Nigeria.

Read More +