The WEF published its 2023 Global Gender Gap Report and examined gender parity across 146 countries, finding that the gender gap has closed across a variety of areas of society by 68.4% globally, up 0.3% from 2022’s 68.1% score.
The Global Gender Gap Report 2023 highlights increasing women’s economic participation and achieving gender parity in leadership, in both business and government, as two key levers for addressing broader gender gaps in households, societies and economies. Collective, coordinated and bold action by private and public sector leaders will be instrumental in accelerating progress on gender parity and igniting renewed growth and greater resilience.
The economic and business case is clear. Making progress on closing the gender gap is crucial for ensuring inclusive, sustainable economic growth. At an individual organization level, gender strategy is seen as essential to attracting the best talent and ensuring long-term economic performance, resilience and survival. Evidence indicates that diverse groups of leaders make more fact-based decisions that result in higher-quality outcomes. At an economy-wide level, gender parity has been recognized as critical for financial stability and economic performance.
Key Findings
- Closing the overall gender gap will require 131 years. At the current rate of progress, it will take 169 years for economic parity and 162 years for political parity.
- Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world for the 14th consecutive year and the only country to have closed more than 90% of its gender gap.
- While women have entered the labour force at higher rates than men globally, leading to a small recovery (63%-64%) in gender parity in the labour-force participation rate since the 2022 edition, gaps in the labour market are persistently wide. Compounding these patterns, women continue to face higher unemployment rates than men with a global unemployment rate at around 4.5% for women and 4.3% for men
- In artificial intelligence, talent availability has surged, increasing sixfold between 2016 and 2022, yet the percentage of women working in AI today is approximately 30%, just 4 percentage points higher than it was in 2016.