In 21st century gender parity should not be a lifetime away

IN a year marked to an extent by decline and damage (think low economic growth, trade wars, leadership regression, mass protests, etc) a recent report on gender parity still managed to raise eyebrows and evoke a sense of dismay and disbelief.

With all the strides towards gender equality and significant steps made in female empowerment in recent years, the World Economic Forum's (WEF) latest findings on the global gender gap, unveiled last week, make for some sobering, dispiriting reading. According to the Swiss-based organisation, it will take almost 100 years (to be exact, 99.5 years on average) to reach gender equality globally across work, education, politics and health at the current pace of progress. And that is already an improvement from 2018, when the WEF researchers predicted it would take 108 years to close the gap.

The findings may also seem a little surprising against a backdrop of women taking high-profile leadership roles at major institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and World Bank; and as head of state of several countries including Germany, Croatia, Slovakia, Serbia, New Zealand, and most recently, Finland. In the corporate world, among the companies with a female boss are IBM, Oracle Corp, Lockheed Martin and General Motors - not exactly "soft" businesses as stereotypes go. But of course such standouts and outliers disappear entirely in the mass data of across-the-board studies such as that of the WEF, which has been tracking global progress in gender equality since 2006, covering economies across the development rungs.