Gender workplace equality 257 years away: Report

Women may have to wait more than two centuries for equality at work, according to a report on Dec. 17 showing gender inequality growing in workplaces worldwide despite increasing demands for equal treatment.

While women appear to be gradually closing the gender gap in areas such as politics, health and education, workplace inequality is not expected to be erased until the year 2276, according to a report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The organisation, which gathers the global elite in the plush Swiss ski resort of Davos each year, said that the worldwide gender gap in the workplace had widened further since last year, when parity appeared to be only 202 years off.

The Geneva-based organisation's annual report tracks disparities between the sexes in 153 countries across four areas: Education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.

The overall gender gap across these categories has shrunk, the report showed, with WEF now forecasting it will take 99.5 years for women to achieve parity on average, down from the 108 years forecast in last year's report.
But while some sectors have shown improvements, others lag far behind. General parity "will take more than a lifetime to achieve," WEF acknowledged in a statement.

WEF said the gender gap was more than 96 percent closed in the area of education and could be eliminated altogether within just 12 years.

The gap was equally small in the health and survival category, but the WEF report said it remained unclear how long it would take to achieve full parity in this domain due to lingering issues in populous countries like China and India.

Politics meanwhile is the domain where the least progress has been made to date, but it showed the biggest...