How COVID and cost of living hit progress on equality: the Global Gender Gap Report 2023

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That statistic comes from the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, an extensive, annual survey whose latest edition has just been published.

In this episode, World Economic Forum Managing Director Saadia Zahidi picks some highlights from the report - which has lots to say about the state of gender inequality in the post-pandemic, cost-of-living squeezed world.

We also hear from Sue Duke, Vice-President of LinkedIn where she heads public policy.

She talks about the challenges facing women in the workplace, particularly in the area of STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths - and how tricky is still is for women to get to the top of companies (the 'C-suite').

Saadia Zahidi, World Economic Forum

Gayle Markovitz: So welcome, Saadia. Here we are, 2023, and another Global Gender Gap Report. There has been a very slight improvement of 0.3% compared to last year, but the rate of change has slowed. So could you just tell us a little bit more about the report? What is the Global Gender Gap Report? What does it measure and why is it important?

Saadia Zahidi: So we look at four dimensions of the global gender gap. We try to understand what's happening in terms of health, educational attainment, economic participation and opportunity, and then, finally, political empowerment. And we aggregate all of that data together and try to provide one single score which tells countries how they're performing on that gender gap.

And at the same time, they can look at a lot of rich information on each one of their country profiles. They can break down the index into sub-indices. They can look at each one of the indicators individually and they can look at a lot of contextual information in other 25 or so indicators that tell them more about what's happening in terms of the gender gap.

And the reason we do this is so that there is annually a snapshot provided to as many economies as possible to tell them how are they performing relative to their own past performance, but also how are they performing compared to each other and making sure that this agenda stays at the top of the minds of policymakers.

Gayle Markovitz: No country has actually ever achieved full gender parity, but there are some that are close. So Iceland has held the top spot for 14 years. Were there any surprises this year or any newcomers?

Saadia Zahidi: So what's been interesting is actually watching Iceland's progress, because it's not just that Iceland has maintained that top spot by staying stagnant. Iceland has maintained that top spot by actually continuing to climb the score position that it has had. It's now closed over 91% of its gender gap. It's the only country in the world that has closed more than 90% of that gender gap. And about a decade or so ago, it was the only country in the world that had closed more than 80% of the gender gap. So it's a country that's consistently outperforming itself and also consequently outperforming the rest of the world.

Gayle Markovitz: And there are a couple of other Nordic countries, I think, in that top ten. Are there regional differences that are quite striking?

Saadia Zahidi: Yes. What's been interesting is Europe continues to rank first when it comes to the regional rankings, followed by North America, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean. And when we look at the trends over time and who is likely to close the gender gap the fastest given the trend line of the last 17 years is actually Latin America and the Caribbean. That is likely to reach parity first, given that it's the region that's progressing the fastest at the moment.

Gayle Markovitz: And if we look across those four areas, the economic participation opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment, in terms of the progress in those areas, how does it make an appreciable difference to the average woman? So it's like, what does my life look like if I'm in Iceland compared to a country which has much lower scores?

Saadia Zahidi: I'll maybe try to give a a couple of examples.

So when it comes to health, we're looking at two very basic indicators. We're looking at the sex ratio at birth and we're looking at healthy life expectancy. And what are the differences between that? Of course, all of this makes a difference every single day to all of us.

But then if we look at the more aggregate picture, we're also looking at the educational attainment. We're looking at whether girls are making it into primary school and secondary school. We're looking at whether young women are going to universities. We're looking at what the overall literacy rate in that population is. And again, even though this is an area of a lot of progress, there are still countries in the world where these numbers are incredibly low, whether that is in Afghanistan, which is 146th in the rankings, out of 146 countries, or other parts of the world where there has been relatively rapid progress but the overall literacy rates remain low because there's previous generations that didn't have the same capabilities given to them.

And then the third element is, we're also looking at, is all of this human capital actually being deployed into the workforce? And that's where there's a very mixed picture. There are countries in the world which are doing extremely well in terms of overall labour force participation and a number of African economies fall into that category. But the wages that women are being paid are much lower than those that men are being paid, and women are not making it into professional and technical and high skilled roles in the same numbers as men.

And the converse is also true. There are countries which are doing very well in terms of having women in higher skilled work, but the overall labour force participation rate and the overall gender gap in terms of wages is very low.

And then finally there's the fourth area, which is around political empowerment, and we try to look at national level data. So we look at women in parliament, women in ministerial positions. And we try to look at whether a woman has been in a head of state or head of government role at any point in the last 50 years.

And, again, that affects all of us because those are the women, or men, that are in political decision making positions. They're deciding how resources across an economy are being distributed. But there's also a role model effect. These are the people that young girls in that country are seeing growing up on TV, and that ends up making a difference as well. So I think from many perspectives, this is something that affects everybody's daily lives.

Gayle Markovitz: And do you think women leaders make different kinds of decisions politically than men who are leaders?

Saadia Zahidi: I think there's some very interesting research that comes from India that suggests that when there are more women in political decision making, resources will be distributed to a wider set of societal and economic issues that will take into account the needs of a greater part of society. So spending will go towards education, will go towards health, will go towards hospitals, will go towards roads, in addition to going towards a number of other areas.

So more of the social factors are taken into account and that's not a surprise. It simply means that there's a wider set of eyes looking at what is needed in a certain community.

But I think the question is less about do women or men inherently make different decisions. It is really about in a well-rounded way do you get to better decision making by having more gender equal teams, and whether that is the top team in the cabinet or whether that is a team in a specific organisation, there is enough evidence to show that you simply get to better decisions.

Gayle Markovitz: Another finding in the report is that closing gender gaps could in fact help accelerate an economic rebound. So how does that work?

Saadia Zahidi: This is one of the fundamental areas of discovery behind the report that countries that tend to be more gender equal also tend to be more competitive, more productive. And again, not surprising, because they're using the full base of human capital that is available to them.

It's also very clear that teams that are more diverse make better decisions, and therefore companies that have more diverse leadership teams also tend to perform better in stock markets, especially the ones that we're able to track through research.

And then a last element is, I think if we think about all of the challenges that we're all collectively facing, whether it's the climate challenge, whether it's the various geopolitical challenges, whether it's the economic challenges, food security, all of these things require the best and the brightest minds. And if innovation is what is needed to move ourselves out of these crises and towards a brighter future, then again, we need all hands on deck and we're going to get to better decisions, better ideas, better creativity, better ingenuity if we have more gender equal decision making.

Gayle Markovitz: So in terms of what needs to happen to close gender gaps, I know that a sort of care infrastructure or lack of care infrastructure has been cited as a particular roadblock. So what can policymakers and businesses and leaders be thinking about doing if they want to address that?

Saadia Zahidi: We have to think of care as an investment and not a cost. And that's really the mindset change that's required.

And that investment can then help, for example, all parents balance better between work and family.

Parental leave is something that is widely accepted in many, many countries, but tends to be concentrated for mothers. Countries that do better on this front tend to be the ones that provide more equal distributed parental leave to both mothers and fathers.

Making care more accessible, more affordable is another element. And for many economies it's actually a massive job creator, especially if they're able to professionalise care roles, make them higher paid roles, then both in terms of elder care and in terms of childcare, there's a possibility to provide very good care jobs to large parts of the workforce that are eager to have this type of role available to them.

Gayle Markovitz: Something that came through in the reports that we brought out during the pandemic was that women bore the brunt of that shock. And now we're in a period of economic volatility. And again, women seem to be bearing the brunt of economic shocks. Why is this and how can we sort of steel our economies to prevent that somehow?

Saadia Zahidi: It's very clear that, even today, women's unemployment rates are higher. And over the course of the pandemic there were greater losses when it came to women's labour force participation.

Now, that's a generalisation for the globe and things look different in different parts of the world. But the 'why' behind this is is quite complex.

I think some element of this has to do with the industries that shed jobs during the pandemic and didn't fully recover tend to be the sectors that employ fairly large numbers of women.

So, for example, the tourism industry has not fully bounced back in all parts of the world, tended to be a large employer of women and therefore there continues to be this gap.

There's a second element, which is an enormous amount of digitisation took place of work over the course of the pandemic. And some of that digitisation has already affected and will tend to affect roles that tend to concentrate more women workers.

So, for example, administrative assistants - we we had our Feature of Jobs report recently, and it showed that that is one of the roles that's going to be most affected by the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Well, that also happens to be a role that is a big employer of women.

And then there's a third element, which is if we look at the highest growth roles of the future, those tend to be roles very concentrated in STEM professions or in technology more broadly, and tend to have a smaller pipeline of women going in despite the fact that more women go to university overall than men.

So that's where some of those differences come from. So it's the pandemic coming together with some of these technological trends.

And then there's the fallout of what happened after the pandemic, which is the war in Ukraine and the effects that that had on food and energy prices. And rising costs tend to affect women, especially low income women, more, because they tend to be more concentrated in roles that don't necessarily allow for future growth or wages to rise and therefore end up bearing the brunt of some of the fallout from inflation.

Gayle Markovitz: I wouldn't mind just talking a little bit about educational attainment because it's quite a complex picture. The report paints the gap as smallest in educational attainment, I think?

Saadia Zahidi: Or it'll be closed the fastest closed.

Gayle Markovitz: This is what I mean. Yes, that's what I mean. 'Skills first' hiring, we read, can benefit women, but then we also read that online learning and the acquisition of skills by women is held back by a persistent digital divide.

Conversely, there's some good news. Despite low enrolment rates, women actually acquire skills faster.

So could you just talk through a little bit because there's quite a lot of information there and it is quite complex.

Saadia Zahidi: I think overall the news is very positive.

The educational attainment gap is already one of the smallest and is being closed relatively fast and hopefully in less than a couple of decades, we will see full parity on that front.

Now, that's just a trend analysis of the last 17 years. We know that there are certain parts of the world where things are going backwards. So, for example, Afghanistan... thankfully, there are very few parts of the world where that type of regression is taking place. In most parts of the world, there is overall larger numbers of women going to university than men. There's parity when it comes to primary education, parity when it comes to secondary education.

There's still perhaps not parity when it comes to the skills of the future and the courses that are available for online learning. And we know how important lifelong learning is - beyond primary school, beyond secondary school, beyond university, for workers and their 30 to 40 year long careers, constant reskilling and upskilling is important. Online learning offers one way of being able to do that, and there a lot of the skills that workers should be acquiring relate to skills of the future that broadly relate to technology, and that is where there is a significant gender gap in terms of how many women are going in to taking those courses.

But at the same time, for those that are taking those courses, whether it's the tech related ones or not, women are tending to get to proficiency faster than men.

The reasons behind that are not clear. Is it because of time poverty and women simply have less time because they have clear responsibilities and other responsibilities that is leading to this faster acquisition of skills? Or is it because of other reasons? I think that we don't know. But we can see some positive evidence that when there is online learning, women are acquiring some of the skills that they might be currently missing faster compared to men.

Gayle Markovitz: Another thing that came up in the Future of Jobs Report recently was that two-thirds of organisations have what's known as a 'diversity equity and inclusion' programme, the organisations surveyed. How do those initiatives typically help?

Saadia Zahidi: I think they can help in terms of simply providing facts and data. In the same way that we do this annual exercise to help countries understand where theystand very objectively based on data, it helps if there is an aggregated view of how an organisation is doing across different levels when it comes to participation of women, especially in leadership roles, because there is what we're describing in this report as a a 'drop to the top' because there's lower and lower numbers of women by the time we get to the C-suite.

That's one element. The second element is, of course, actually working on programmes that help address that gap, whether that is having more gender-blind hiring, having panels that are anonymized when it comes to deciding on progression opportunities, ensuring that there are equal numbers of women and men being considered for the next round of leadership position.

So there's a number of different things that that can be done. And of course some companies as well as some countries and policymakers have chosen to put in place quotas and actually mandate a change when it comes to leadership.

Robin Pomeroy: Saadia Zahidi.

You're listening to Radio Davos and our episode on the Global Gender Gap Report 2023.

LinkedIn is a social media site with a distinct focus on careers, and the company has good insights into the world of work. Vice-President Sue Duke, who is in charge there of public policy spoke to Gayle Markovitz about the challenges facing women in the workplace, particularly in the area of STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths - and how tricky is still is for women to get to the top of companies, sometimes know as 'C-suite' roles, as they are often abbreviated to CEO, or CFO.

Here's Gayle again.

Sue Duke, LinkedIn

Gayle Markovitz: So this Gender Gap Report paints a pretty stark picture for women. You said in your blog for the Forum Agenda that things are getting worse, not better, for women's careers. Why is this?

Sue Duke: Our labour markets and economies have gone through enormous changes over the past number of years. Obviously, the pandemic and the economic upheaval that came with it is the starkest examples we have. And what we've learned through these cycles is that when there are these big systemic shocks, health, economic or other shocks, it's women who take the biggest hits.

And this year's report and LinkedIn's data showed that in a year when we saw widespread economic uncertainty, women once again bore the brunt of the shock.

Today, just over 32% of women are in leadership roles. That number is down from last year and it's down from the year before that, which means we're right back to where we were in 2020. And let's not forget that 2020 was when the pandemic was at its height and women were already in a tough spot.

The same dynamic is at play when we look at the number of women being hired into leadership roles. Every year since 2016, the global workforce has seen a 1% increase in the hiring rate of women into leadership roles. Not a huge number, but still progress in the right direction. But when the pandemic hit, that rate started to go backwards. And today, again, as economic uncertainty takes hold, we see that number falling back to 2021 levels, including in some of our biggest economies like the UK, the US, Brazil and India.

History is repeating itself and we're making the same mistakes that we made during the pandemic. As once again, women's careers are forced to take a backseat and we see this reversal in some of those positive gains that women have made in the workforce over the last number of years.

Gayle Markovitz: So you talk in the report and in your blog as well about what you call a 'drop to the top'. Can you explain a little bit more about that and what that shows us about this issue or lack of women in leadership positions?

Sue Duke: It's very simple. The higher you go up the career ladder, the lower the numbers are for women.

You take a step back and look at the global picture on LinkedIn. That's a picture that comprises over 930 million members spread across almost every country in the world.

When we look at that global picture, women make up about half of entry level roles about a third of leadership roles, and about a quarter of senior leadership roles. So we go from one in two at entry point, to one in three, to one in four by the time we get to C-suite.

And in some of the highest growth, highest earning STEM industries, that one in four number halves again to one in eight. So in those STEM industries, we're only seeing one in every eight leadership role being held by women.

But even in industries where we see a very high representation of women, such as education, they're on average at entry level, we see women holding 60% of the positions. But again, by the time we get to C-suite, we see that number shrinking rapidly. We're only at 39% by the time those women walk into the boardroom in the education sector.

That tells us that these challenges that women are facing are systemic and that tells us that we're going to need a systemic response if we're going to address them fully.

Gayle Markovitz: So when you talk about systemic problems and a systemic response, what exactly do you mean? What would a systemic response look like?

Sue Duke: There are very practical solutions that governments and businesses can take to help women reach their full potential.

First, we need to get more women hired into leadership roles. That fundamentally comes down to more inclusive hiring policies and practices, including removing any biases from job descriptions, and employers insisting on having a balanced panel of candidates and a balanced panel of interviewers.

Second, we need to bring more women through the ranks within organisations. That drop to the top that you spoke about, that tells us very, very clearly that we're going to need to focus on female development throughout the entire life cycle of women. That means mentoring and training programmes are critical for women in early management roles, in particular, at the pre management role as well.

And also we need to focus in on those male dominated fields, including in STEM.

And the third thing is taking a 'skills first' approach to hiring. That means you recruit for skills instead of relying on traditional credentials and signals like previous job title or education.

If we can adopt a skills first approach to hiring, we can help women overcome some of the legacy challenges that they've faced.

So there are some of the key areas, practical things that organisations and policymakers can do to help women advance to leadership levels in all industries and in all countries.

Gayle Markovitz: You talk about STEM, just for some of our listeners who might not know, that's science, technology, engineering and maths. Why is it particularly worrying in terms of the jobs of the future that there are not enough women going into those roles?

Sue Duke: The first thing is that STEM roles are some of the fastest growing and most in-demand roles out there. And that means that these are most likely going to be the roles that are most resilient to these economic shocks that we experience.

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Those roles play a critically important role in determining what kind of society and economy we develop in the future.

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So they are the jobs not only of today, but also of tomorrow. Not only is it vitally important that we allow women access equal access to those roles. But secondly, they are precisely the roles that have a very significant influence in shaping all aspects of technology and how it's deployed in the world.

And we have to have women's voices and perspectives represented at that foundational formative stage and playing an equal role in determining what technologies have developed, how they're deployed and what impact they have.

And there we have a serious, serious problem. Women are significantly underrepresented in STEM roles generally, and STEM leadership roles specifically.

Women make up just 29% of the STEM workforce on a leadership level. Only two in every ten leadership roles are held by women.

So we have got to get to grips with what is a serious imbalance in those roles. In particular, not only because they would be the roles of tomorrow, but because those roles play a critically important role in determining what kind of society and economy we develop in the future.

Gayle Markovitz: Drawing on that, one of the findings in the report is that having women in stable and growing roles might actually make the economic shocks less likely. Where does that correlation come from?

Sue Duke: This goes back again to the fact that if these roles are the roles that are growing the fastest and are often the highest earning roles out there.

If we can get women into those roles, we know that women's careers are going to be less vulnerable to economic shocks.

In addition, if we can get women into leadership roles specifically in those rapidly growing sectors, not only will women be more resistant to economic shocks, but the WEF's own report found today that having women in secure resilient future-proofed roles, those roles that are here today but are also going to be growing tomorrow, that is much more likely to result in shocks happening in the first place. So it's good for women, but it's good for the broader economy as well.

Gayle Markovitz: I'm very interested in the idea of women in leadership, and some of the events that have been happening this year, we've seen quite a lot of high profile women step back like Jacinda Ardern, for example. What do you think that tells us? Do you think women lead differently to men and they're just not accepting the same kinds of environments and want to do it differently?

Sue Duke: Look, we have a very clear problem at leadership level in all areas of both public life and industry more broadly.

The problem of female representation in political life is very well documented in today's WEF Global Gender Gap report. And our own LinkedIn data shows very clearly that there is not a single industry where we have reached gender parity in leadership.

Both the data and women's experience of work consistently tell us that women face barriers in their career and pressures that are disproportionately higher than what men experience.

The COVID pandemic was such a stark reminder of that. We saw women not only taking the biggest hit in terms of layoffs and workforce participation, but also working women were the people who bore disproportionately the additional care responsibilities that the pandemic brought for so many.

One of the more positive developments is how we've seen leadership styles evolving over the past number of years, and we've seen that play out very clearly on our platform in the conversations that are happening day in, day out on LinkedIn. More and more leaders, women as well as men, are honest and vulnerable about the challenges that they face, the struggles they've gone through, and the full range of emotions that leading and living entails.

And I think that that has been hugely empowering development for younger, more junior workers, again, men as well as women, that they have these role models that they can turn to again and understanding that being a leader and a strong leader seems to be so much more real and authentic and doable. And you see that when leaders are vulnerable and honest in the way that we see them be on our platform today.

Gayle Markovitz: Another bit of good news that I read was that there's a much higher proportion of women starting their own businesses. Do you think there might be a sort of delayed uptick in the fortunes of women and how parity plays out in the workplace if more and more businesses are actually founded by women and are very fundamentally different from the ground up? And then what do you think that might mean for those businesses that are still quite traditional?

Sue Duke: I think the honest answer is that we just don't know yet.

We don't know exactly how that data is going to play out in terms of is this a long-term sustainable trend, and is this something that's ultimately good for women.

We've certainly seen on our on our platform over the past number of years a growing trend of women founding their own businesses at a faster rate than men. Exactly as you say. And we saw that trend accelerate during the pandemic.

In 2020 we saw the share of founders growing year on year by 45% for women, and it was just 32% for men. And that was, again, 2020 when the pandemic was at its height.

And part of the driver, at least for that surge in these female founders, was those experiences that women were having during the pandemic.

Firstly, they were much more likely to work, and the industries most impacted by lockdowns, such as retail, hospitality and other areas. And secondly, we saw women really struggling to balance that double shift between managing their care responsibilities and their professional responsibilities.

And so we're sure that at least some of that surge was in part to women setting up their own businesses just to get more flexibility and manage their careers in a way that was possible for them and their families.

There are some signs that that rate is starting to slacken and those female founders may be under pressure.

Our data in the US shows that the number of new male founders grew 7% between 2021 and 2022. But for female founders, we saw that number go the other direction. We saw a 5% drop over the same period.

So there are some conflicting signs coming out about exactly how long-term that trend is and exactly how positive is it for women.

It's a trend we're monitoring very closely, and we'll be sure to come back with to you when we know more about where the data is ultimately pointing.

Gayle Markovitz: Are there any industries which seem to be going in a much better trajectory than others? I'm just thinking about my daughters, for example, what would be good to advise them to get into because it could work out well.

Sue Duke: Let's get them into leadership roles right now. We need all industries to have more women in leadership roles.

There is simply no industry that's fully getting it right.

There are, of course, some sectors that are performing better than others. Consumer services and retail are probably the two that come out on top. What those two industries tell you is that even in industries where we have a very healthy pipeline of talent, over 50% of of the entry level roles are held by women. Despite that, even in those industries that pipeline gets pinched and pinched and narrower and narrower at every point of seniority, such that by the time you get to the top, we still have fewer than 40% of women in the boardroom.

So there is no industry that does not have work to do.

We need to concentrate our efforts systemically across all industries and all countries so that your daughters and a whole generation of women do succeed in ascending to the top and into those leadership positions.

Gayle Markovitz: Just anecdotally, I have many friends who are not interested in leadership positions. They don't they just don't want that in their lives. Do you think there's some mindset change that needs to happen before women even get into the workforce? I mean, why do you think there is thinking, is it just lack of role models partially?

Sue Duke: I think partially it is lack of role models.

I think it's very hard to see yourself being something that doesn't exist. And it's crucially important when we think about the systemic practices and policies that we need to put in place, that we are putting these female leaders in place as role models and having them directly influence through mentoring and hot housing programmes, junior women coming through the ranks.

I think the second thing Gayle, honestly, is that work has not been working for women in the same way that it has been for men.

Again, COVID was such a stark reminder of that that when things got tough, they got really, really tough for women and they find themselves often in these impossible positions.

We saw a lot of women founding their own companies. We saw a lot of women leaving the workforce because it was impossible to do this double shift of juggling your personal responsibilities as well as your professional responsibilities.

So we need to change work so that it works for women just as well as it works for men.

Robin Pomeroy: Sue Duke of LinkedIn. You also heard from Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum. Both were interviewed by Gayle Markovitz.

There so much more in the Gender Gap Report 2023 - find it on our website, along with that article by Sue Duke and lots of other analysis.

Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review. And join the conversation on the World Economic Forum Podcast club -- look for that on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production was by Gareth Nolan.

We will be back next week, with the final episode in our special series on generative AI - please listen back to the earlier episodes - but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.