The World Economic Forum says women will be waiting 107 and 202 years to respectively close political and economic gender gaps.
A new study titled The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 warns the western world of backsliding when it comes issues of gender equality. The 367-page “insight report” dinged the U.S. for sliding to 51st regarding “wage equality” while Nordic countries captured took the top three slots.
“Projecting current trends into the future, the overall global gender gap will close in 108 years across the 106 countries covered since the first edition of the report,” WEF’s researchers concluded. “The most challenging gender gaps to close are the economic and political empowerment dimensions, which will take 202 and 107 years to close respectively.”
“Although the economic opportunity gap has slightly reduced this year, the progress has been slow, especially in terms of participation of women in labor force, where the gender gap slightly reversed,” the report continued. “In terms of political empowerment, the progress achieved over the past decade has started to reverse.”
The best “gender-equal” nations included:
- Iceland: “It has closed over 85% of its overall gender gap.”
- Norway: 83.5 percent of its gender gap closed.
- Sweden:82.2 percent of its gender gap closed.
- Finland: 82.2 percent of its gender gap closed.
“The overall picture is that gender equality has stalled,” said Saadia Zahidi, head of social and economic agendas at WEF, Deutsche Welle reported Tuesday. “The future of our labor market may not be as equal as the trajectory we thought we were on.”
Anna-Karin Jatfors, regional director for UN Women, was displeased with the findings.
“202 years is too long a wait,” she said in a statement, The New York Daily News reported.
Critics of “gender pay gap” studies often note that key variables, when ignored, can wildly skew findings.
“Women as a group do get paid less than men as a group,” the famous economist Thomas Sowell wrote in August 2016. “But not for doing the same work. Women average fewer annual hours of work than men. They work continuously for fewer years than men, since only women get pregnant, and most women are not prepared to instantly dump the baby on somebody else to raise.”
“Being a mother is not an incidental sideline, and being a single mother can be a major restriction on how much time can be put into a job, either in a year or over the years,” he continued in an op-ed for National Review. “As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married. … Too many people in the media and in academia abandon their roles as conduits for facts and take on the role of filterers of facts to promote social and political agendas.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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