The World Economic Forum issued a report focusing on gender equality and the importance of parity in the economic and societal sectors, further examining gender gap prospects in the professions of the future. Yet, the report reveals that “gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years”, an issue which is apparent in many sectors, such as shipping, which still remains a male-dominant industry.
Specifically, the Global Gender Gap Report 2020 analyses on 153 countries, focusing on the progress they have made in four fields; Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment.
- Gender Pay Gap
According to the report, pay differentials between men and women are a persistent form of gender inequality in the workplace and the progress towards closing the gender gap on this aspect has stalled.
WEForum explains that to better understand the differences concerning gender pay gap, it is important to keep in mind the four metrics for cross-country comparison.
Specifically:
- The OECD’s gender wage gap is defined as the difference between male and female median wages divided by male median wages. Wages are computed for full-time equivalent dependent employees and are expressed in Purchasing Power Parity terms.
- The ILO’s gender median and mean pay gaps are two indicators computed either as the difference between the median wages of men to that of women; or as the difference between the average wages of men and women. In both cases ILO uses hourly wages.
- The ILO’s factor-weighted gender pay gap is a corrected version of the measures above. Simply put, the raw mean and median wage differences are corrected (using econometric analysis) by four factors: education levels, age, working time (full-time versus part-time) and status (private-sector versus public-sector employment).
- The World Economic Forum’s wage equality for similar work is derived from the Executive Opinion Survey, a questionnaire answered by business leaders in over 140 countries. The respondents are asked: “In your country, for similar work, to what extent are wages for women equal to those of men?” (1 = not at all, significantly below those of men; 7 = fully, equal to those of men). These individual answers are then aggregated, and the resulting figures are converted into 0–1 scores, where 1 stands for equal pay between women and men, working in a similar position.
Looking at the trend, the average wage gap in OECD countries is closing but at a very slow rate. As shown in Figure 1.1, it was 14.5% a decade ago and is now 13.5%, and it has therefore reduced by 1 percentage point in 10 years. This direction is consistent with Executive Opinion Survey trends, which finds that in OECD countries, the wage equality for similar work has increased by approximately 2 percentage points in 10 years.3 Both trends are encouraging, but too slowly
Despite the improvement, the shipping industry lacks behind remaining a male-dominant sector, yet now makes great efforts in attracting more women in the industry, highlighting the importance on gender equality.
Supporting the women in the shipping industry, year 2019 was all about gender equality and women power. Specifically, the World Maritime Day (September 26) was celebrated under the theme “Empowering Women in the Maritime Community“, with gender equality being recognized as one of the key drivers to enhance diversity and therefore efficiency in the business world, and especially in the male-dominated shipping sector.
The ones at the top of tackling gender inequality are:
- Iceland: The top country for gender parity
- Albania, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico and Spain: the most improved
- 101 out of 149 countries ranked improved their scores on the 2019 index (this excludes the five new countries that have joined the ranking this year).
- 48 saw their performance unchanged, while the top 10th percentile saw their scores improve more than 3.3% year-on-year.
- A total of 35 countries have achieved gender parity in education.
- In healthcare, 48 countries have achieved near-parity and 71 have closed at least 97% of the gap.
Closing the gender gap country accelerators:
Each country works towards the following four objectives across all countries through the country specific action plan:
- Increasing female labour force participation broadly and in selected sectors
- Increasing the number of women in leadership positions
- Closing gaps in wage and remuneration
- Building parity in emerging high-demand skills and jobs
By region:
- Western Europe has made the most progress on gender parity (standing at 76.7%),
- North America (72.9%)
- Latin America
- the Caribbean (72.2%)
- Eastern Europe and Central Asia (71.3%)
- Sub-Saharan Africa (68.2%)
- South Asia (66.1%)
- the Middle East and North Africa (60.5%).
These figures, however, mask several key trends, which have a significant impact on the time to gender parity. In North America progress stalled during 2019, while further south in Latin America and the Caribbean, several countries performed strongly over the course of the year.
The above translates into gender parity in years as:
Western Europe | 54 |
Latin America and the Caribbean | 59 |
South Asia |
71.5
|
Sub-Saharan Africa | 95 |
Eastern Europe and Central Asia | 107 |
Middle East and North Africa | 140 |
North America | 151 |
East Asia and the Pacific | 163 |
Overall, the report highlights that
In this respect, gender gaps remain and are likely to become exacerbated unless addressed now.
To explore more on the “Global Gender Gap 2020” click herebelow