The Global Gender Gap

Living in the 21^st century, any sensible person would expect gender equality to be a ‘thing’ by now but unfortunately that dream is still not a reality. The World Economic Forum has released the Global Gender Gap Report 2015, which measures over ten years of global gender gap performance.

Out of 145 countries, Australia ranked #36 with a score of 0.733 (0.00 = inequality and 1.00 = equality) Improvement is evident but equality is not yet achieved. Since 2006, an extra quarter of a billion women have entered the world’s labor force. A decade ago the annual pay for women was $6k compared to men at $11k. The good news is that in 2015 women too are earning an average of $11k but that is not good news at all when men have almost doubled to an average of $21k.

Although there is still A LOT of room for improvement, the biggest progress towards closing the gender gap has been in the politics. Half of the world’s countries have a female head of state and 19% of parliamentarians are female.

The UK has introduced new regulations, which will force companies with more than 250 employees to reveal their gender pay gap on their websites each year. Could this be a positive step towards to progressively closing the gap?