These five initiatives will accelerate gender parity for economic recovery

Parity between men and women is important for economic recovery. These five investments will speed up the process.

In the past few years, there have been big setbacks on the way to gender equality, and the risk of more setbacks is growing. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a generational loss, which means that between 2020 and 2022, the time it is expected to take to reach gender equality around the world went from 100 to 132 years. All over the world, women's rights are under attack.

Millions of women and girls are losing access and opportunities because of these changes, which also hurt the global economy in a lot of different ways. At the same time, women continue to break new ground and rise to positions of power in the public and private sectors that have never been held by a woman before. For the first time, at least one woman is in every parliament in the world, and new research shows that the diversity of women MPs is at its highest level ever.

We are living in a time of many crises, with high volatility and more uncertainty than ever before. There are now economic gaps that hurt women, people of colour, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities more than they do other people. For people whose identities in these areas overlap, the bad things tend to get worse. At the start of 2023, women are still being excluded from full economic participation as employees, leaders, consumers, and suppliers, and in some cases, this is getting worse. Long-term trends, such as technological change and climate change, are likely to widen the gap between men and women, and the value of unpaid work is still not being recognized, and care work is still being done in an unequal way. In the past few years, technological advances have happened at a rate that has never been seen before. However, access is still very uneven, and innovation isn't aimed at solving today's biggest problems or helping everyone.

Getting equal pay for men and women is still a tough, multi-faceted challenge. The two biggest gaps, according to the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, are in economic opportunity (where only 22% of the gap has been closed) and political empowerment (where only 60% of the gap has been closed). Where should we focus our efforts as a group?

In every part of the world, the number of women working dropped by a lot during the pandemic years. Women who had to take care of other people were especially likely to leave the workforce and not come back. Since 2009, the number of women and men in the workforce around the world has been slowly going down. In 2022, it was at 62.9%, which was the lowest level since the Global Gender Gap Index started being made in 2006. But the IMF says that if more women worked, that alone could boost the economic output of some countries by as much as 35%.

In 2022, 33.4% of senior leadership positions in the public and private sectors will be held by women. This was a steady improvement from the years before and a bright spot for gender equality. From 2006 to 2022, the number of women ministers almost doubled, and the number of women in parliament went from 14.9% in 2006 to 22.9% in 2022.

Some industries where women have been underrepresented in the past, like technology, energy, supply chain, and transportation, have been hiring women into leadership roles at a faster rate since 2016. However, this positive change seems to be in danger, as gains have been rolled back in recent months, and early data suggests that tech layoffs are hurting women more than men.

Also, more and more women are leaving leadership positions in both business and politics. The challenge is still to make sure that women can not only move up into senior leadership roles but also do well in those roles. Getting out of the current crisis will require more diverse leadership from all parties involved, as different points of view have been shown to lead to better, more fact-based decisions.

Pay gaps between men and women are still one of the clearest signs of unfairness in the current system. According to the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, the difference between men's and women's estimated earned income was about 49%, while the difference between men's and women's wages for the same work was about 35%. In OECD countries, the difference between men's and women's median earnings for full-time work is 13%. Pay gap reporting and/or auditing by private sector companies is still fairly new, but it is now required in almost half of OECD countries. So far, the evidence has shown that these measures have had, at best, small effects. More promising examples for scaling are coming from the front lines of industrial action, where ambitious global governance frameworks and automated analytics are being created by individual companies to close the gender pay gap.

Women are still not taken into account in key parts of the innovation ecosystem. A plan to make innovation systems more equal between men and women brings to light a number of ways to improve gender equality. These include making sure everyone has the same access to education and training for in-demand STEM skills, giving everyone the same access to jobs and leadership opportunities in the industries of the future, giving everyone the same access to venture capital, and, on a more basic level, closing the digital gender gap. Taking care of these issues is important for a fair transition to a green and digital economy, making products that work for both men and women and serve a larger market, and growing the talent pool, which will lead to more creative and faster solutions to the huge problems humanity faces today.

In many countries, care jobs are low-paying and make it hard to move up in society. Women, people of colour, and migrant workers are most likely to work in these jobs. 76% of all unpaid care work is done by women around the world, which often keeps them from getting paid jobs. In economies that measure the value of unpaid care, the sector has been found to be worth between 10 and 39% of GDP, according to the ILO, and this number is expected to rise as the population changes and more people need care. So, building a strong care economy will make it easier for women to participate in the economy on equal terms and help close the gaps between men and women in the workforce, pay, and leadership.

By 2023, equal pay for men and women will have to be a main goal of economic policy and business strategies. Focusing on these five areas will not only make societies fairer but will also be a high-return investment in the future of the global economy and a requirement for ending the current crisis.