Economic Gap

In 2021, The World Economic Forum (WEF) announced that closing the gender gap had just been pushed back another whole generation. The most recent Global Gender Gap Report notes that women will have to wait 135.6 years to achieve global gender parity – an increase of 36 years from the 2020 figure of 99.5 years.

WEF now estimates that it will take an enormous 267.6 years to close the economic gender gap due to continuing income disparities, and low representation of women in leadership and managerial positions. 

According to The Washington Post, the first twelve months of the pandemic “knocked 54 million women around the world out of work” and of the women who lost jobs in 2020 “almost 90 percent exited the labour force completely compared with around 70 percent of men.” The Post analysed national data sets and told the stories of individual women from three case study countries – Peru, Thailand and France.

Covid-19 job losses have hit women harder than men, not least because they are employed in high numbers in sectors most immediately affected by lockdowns – such as hospitality and retail – and were also affected by additional caring responsibilities at home. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, among others, have described this burden as working a “double shift.”

In a keynote speech marking International Women’s Day on March 8th 2021, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist, Gita Gopinath, laid out a series of measures to increase the economic equality of women around the world. These included boosting tax advantages for part time work, higher government spending on childcare, increasing flexible work provision, and the removal of legal, institutional or regulatory impediments that are keeping women from participating fully in the workplace.

UN Women set out 5 steps that governments and businesses could take to mitigate the economic effect of the pandemic on women. These include: direct income support to women; support for women-owned and -led businesses; support for women workers; support for informal workers; and the reconciliation of paid and unpaid work.

#Investing in childcare at the national level

• Germany made nursery places for children under age 3 a legal right in 2013. This was accompanied by a massive expansion of subsidized child care places. By 2017, 37 per cent of under-3s were enrolled, with a positive knock-on effect for mothers’ paid employment. 
• Chile has expanded free public childcare services and extended their opening hours to fit in with the schedules of working parents. By 2017, 32 per cent of under-3s had a childcare place. Crucially, the gap in access between children in the richest and poorest families had also narrowed.
• In Kenya, a pilot programme in an informal settlement in Nairobi found that women provided with subsidized childcare vouchers over a 12-month period were 17.3 per cent more likely to be employed than those who did not receive a voucher.

#Fixing the housework gender gap

In Sweden, a country that ranks top in the EU’s Gender Equality Index, cutting down on domestic chores was made possible by a tax reduction policy through which the state pays half of every housework bill, such as cleaning, laundry and ironing. While the tax break remains controversial in many ways, research from academics at Stockholm University in 2014 concluded that married women working full-time who hired cleaners devoted an average 60% of the hours they saved to their own paid employment, and argued that expanding domestic services could help minimise Sweden’s gender pay gap.

#Introducing quotas for female management

The Norwegian experience shows that compulsory quotas for female board members —first introduced in the country in 2004 with a 40% female quota— can be effective in improving the gender balance. However, the OECD warns the overall economic consequences of mandatory quotas have yet to become clear and suggests a range of tools can be used to work towards the goal of gender balance – target setting, compliance with corporate governance codes and, in all cases, the monitoring and publication of progress.