Women continue to be underrepresented at all career levels and job providers are not building enough future female talent pipelines, a joint study conducted by the World Economic Forum and consultancy firm Mercer has found.
The report, titled ‘Our When Women Thrive, Businesses Thrive’, says that despite an increasing number of women being given leadership and managerial roles, we are actually moving backwards in terms of gender equality and will not achieve gender parity by 2025.
Currently women represent only 18% of the average technology firm’s executives and comprise only 34% of the total workforce.
The same for the Financial sector is even worse. The study says that in 2016, the gender gap went wider, with the percentage of women dropping from 15% to 12%.
"The study finds that organisations globally will not achieve gender equality by 2025, with inequality even growing in some industries. Even when we examine additional opportunities to close gaps in hiring, promotion and retention that disadvantage women, the forecast still falls short of parity,” the report said.
World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2016 says that it would take the world another 170 years to achieve pay parity, which is 52 years longer than projected by WEF previously.
A gender gap is pronounced amongst lawmakers too, with only four countries in the world having equal number of male and female legislators.
Other highlights of the Mercer-WEF study were that just 35% of organisations have a pay equity analysis built on a robust statistical approach – and only 29% organisations routinely review performance ratings by gender to check for disparities.
Another report by the WEF, The Future of Jobs estimates that this disparity will only increase further.
The report says that in the coming days automation and displacement are likely to cause a dent in the number of jobs in the office and administrative sectors - which are areas with the highest female participation.
Further, sectors where the number of jobs are likely to increase viz, management, computer, mathematics, architecture and engineering have low female participation.