Roundup: Gender wage inequality persists, warns WEF report

Despite an additional quarter of a billion women entering the global workforce since 2006, wage inequality persists with women only now earning what men did a decade ago, according to a report published Thursday by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The Global Gender Gap Report 2015 ranks 145 countries on the gap between women and men on health, education, economic and political indicators. It aims to understand whether countries are distributing their resources and opportunities equitably between women and men, irrespective of their overall income levels.

With no country having closed its overall gender gap, Nordic nations remain the most gender-equal societies in the world with the leading four nations being Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.

For education, the picture is mixed. Worldwide, 25 countries have now closed their gap entirely, with the most progress having been made in university education, where women now make up the majority of students in nearly 100 countries.

But progress has not been universal, with 22 percent of all countries measured continuously over the past 10 years seeing a widening of the gap between men and women when it comes to education.

There is also a marked lack of correlation between getting more women in education and their ability to earn a living particularly through skilled or leadership roles.

"More women than men are enrolled in universities in nearly 100 countries but women hold the majority of senior roles in only a handful of countries. Companies and governments need to implement new policies to prevent this continued loss of talent and instead leverage it for boosting growth and competitiveness", said Saadia Zahidi, head of the Global Challenge on Gender Parity at the WEF.

Health and survival condition is the closest to parity between the two genders, while political empowerment is the widest. Only two countries have reached parity in parliament and only four have reached parity on ministerial roles.

Ten years of data from the Global Gender Gap Report since 2006 reveal that the region with the largest absolute improvement is Latin America, followed by Asia and the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa and North America. Enditem