The Middle East and North Africa region remains the worst performing in the world related to the gap between men and women across health, education, work and politics.
The MENA region obtained the lowest score (61.1 percent) despite having narrowed its gap by 0.5 points since last year. Assuming the same rate of progress going forward it will take about 150 years to close the gender gap in the region.
The UAE (120th out of 153) was the top ranked country from the Gulf region with a score of 65.5 percent while 15 of the 19 countries in this region ranked 130th or lower.
Yemen was ranked botton while Saudi Arabia ranked a lowly 146th, Oman 144th, Bahrain 133rd and Kuwait 122nd. The report came out just before news that Kuwait had appointed the region’s first female finance minister.
Globally, the time it will take to close the gender gap narrowed to 99.5 years in 2019, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020.Worldwide in 2019, women now hold 25.2 percent of parliamentary lower-house seats and 21.2 percent of ministerial positions, compared to 24.1 percent and 19 percent respectively last year.Politics, however, remains the area where least progress has been made to date while the other major battlefield is economic participation. Here, the gap widened in 2019 to 57.8 percent closed from 58.1 percent closed in 2018.
Nordic countries continued to lead the way to gender parity. Iceland (87.7 percent) remains the world’s most gender-equal country, followed by Norway 84.2 percent), Finland (83.2 percent) and Sweden (82 percent). Other economies in the top 10 include Nicaragua (80.4 percent), New Zealand (79.9 percent), Ireland (79.8 percent), Spain (79.5 percent), Rwanda (79.1 percent) and Germany (78.7 percent).
Among the countries that improved the most this year are Spain in Western Europe, Ethiopia in Africa, Mexico in Latin America, and Georgia in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.“Supporting gender parity is critical to ensuring strong, cohesive and resilient societies around the world. For business, too, diversity will be an essential element to demonstrate that stakeholder capitalism is the guiding principle. This is why the World Economic Forum is working with business and government stakeholders to accelerate efforts to close the gender gap,” said Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.The report said possibly the greatest challenge preventing the economic gender gap from closing is women’s under-representation in emerging roles.
New analysis conducted in partnership with LinkedIn shows that women are, on average, heavily under-represented in most emerging professions in the technology sector.“To get to parity in the next decade instead of the next two centuries, we will need to mobilise resources, focus leadership attention and commit to targets across the public and private sectors. Business-as-usual will not close the gender gap,” said Saadia Zahidi, head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society and member of the managing board, World Economic Forum.
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