According to the World Economic Forum 2024 Gender Gap Report, the global gender gap only moved 0.1% lower year over year. If the pace continues at this rate, it will take up to 134 years to fully close this disparity.

World Economic Forum managing director Saadia Zahidi joins Catalysts to give insight into this report, breaking down the leaders in gender parity and catalysts for improvement.

Zahidi lays out two factors that could improve the global gender gap: "So one is the care systems in the most successful countries tend to be those that build out care infrastructure and ensure that it's essentially not just women that are having to provide child care and elder care. Some have gone for public systems, some have gone for privately funded systems... The second big area is getting more women into political participation and into decision-making roles that actually then end up changing policy."

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This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

Well, the global gender gap closing by a marginal 10th of a percent from a year ago.

This according to the latest report out today from the World Economic Forum.

Now, according to the new report, if the piece continues at this rate, it's going to take up to 100 and 34 years to fully close the gap.

For more on this report ultimately impact that it could have here on the economy we wanna bring in Sadia Zahidi World Economic Forums Managing director Sadia It's it's great to see you.

So let's take a step back and talk about the findings of this report because yes, we did see marginal improvement, although I did notice that the pace has slowed just a bit.

So I'm curious what you attribute this to and how big of a risk this could ultimately be here to that longer term goal of obviously getting on par.

Yeah, I, I think, um, you know you you've summed it up there.

The pace of change is slowing down and this is something that has been happening over time.

There's a little bit of a gain of a few years.

Um, in one year and then a little bit of a loss another year.

But at the end of the day, what this means is it could take five generations to get to parity.

Uh, you know, the year 2158 if we continue at the current rate of change.

So there really needs to be a lot more acceleration when it comes to the efforts from businesses, the efforts from governments and ensuring that we actually unlock and use all of the human capital investment that has been made across countries.

The index looks at four different areas.

Health and education, economic participation and political empowerment on the first two, For most of the world, there is parity.

But then, when it comes to economic participation and political empowerment, the same isn't happening.

So we are essentially wasting all of that investment.

I do wanna bring it home here to the States, and interestingly, at the top of your report, you have the 2024 top 10 rankings in terms of countries hitting the pay gap a little bit more directly and successfully, uh, the United States keenly not part of that list.

What are we seeing in the data in terms of what the US is doing on the pay gap and how that progress is looking.

Yeah, so the top 10 countries very much dominated by Europe and the number one country in the world.

Iceland is the only country that has crossed closing over 90% of his gender gap and has been in that top spot for about 15 years.

The US, on the other hand, is at 43 very much on par with where things were last year.

And while it's an economy that does fairly well in terms of economic participation, it's the leadership gap in both politics and in economic participation that's driving its ranking overall.

So what do you What do you think is the catalyst, then, beyond elections that needs to happen in order to see more improvement?

And also I, I think the big thing is also for that rate of improvement to pick up in speed, too.

Yeah, um, three.

Probably big things that need to be looked at.

So one is the care systems in the most successful countries tend to be those that build out care infrastructure and ensure that it's essentially not just women that are having to provide child care and elder care.

Some have gone for public systems.

Some have gone for privately funded systems.

But at the end of the day, there is something available that allows for workers to balance family and work.

The second big area is getting more women into political participation and into decision making roles that actually then end up changing policy.

And, of course, this big year for elections in 24 and 25 could be one of those that provides an opportunity to get more women into public office.

And then the third area is more of a focus on the growing roles of the future.

And the most striking example of this is stem related fields.

I think we all know how much a. I and technology is not just starting to seep into various aspects of the economy already, but what a game changer it is going to be in the future.

And if in those roles there can be more of an effort to ensure that women are going into a I related roles, women are going into wider technology related roles where there is still a very significant gap that's going to of course, occupy those specific jobs of the future.

But it's also going to change how things end up for our economies and societies.

More broadly, more diverse teams in those fields matter, so those would be the three big things care political office and then a focus on the jobs of the future.

Ideally, I would love to see more women in positions of power in all positions across all types of companies and sectors.

Saria Thank you so much for joining us.

That was Saria Zahidi.

She is World Economic Forum managing director.