By Sarah Green
Harvard Business Review | October 25, 2013
The World Economic Forum has just come out with their latest data on
global gender equality, and the short version could well be this old
Beatles lyric: “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better. A little better,
all the time. (It can’t get more worse.)”
I talked with Saadia Zahidi, a Senior Director at the WEF and their
Head of Gender Parity and Human Capital. Yes, it’s getting better. Out
of the 110 countries they’ve been tracking since 2006, 95 have improved
and just 14 have fallen behind (a single country, Sweden, has remained
the same). But that’s partly because in some places, there was nowhere
to go but up.
And not everyone has improved at the same rates, or for the same reasons.
For instance, in Latin America, several countries surged ahead as
more women were elected to political office. That was a trend in Europe,
too – much of the improvement in Europe’s scores was due not to women’s
increased workforce participation, but instead to the increasingly
female face of public leadership. Although those numbers are still very
low overall, increasingly women are being appointed (and somewhat more
rarely, elected) to public office. “Looking at eight years worth of
data, a lot of the changes are coming from the political end of the
spectrum, and to some extent the economic one. So much of the
[workforce] talent is now female, you would expect the changes to be on
the economic front but that’s not what’s happening,” said Zahidi.
To read more.....
No comments:
Post a Comment