The 2022 index results point to a sustained stalling of gender parity alongside the continued knock-on effects of the pandemic and broader disruptions to the labour market. Gender gaps in the workforce are driven and affected by many factors, including long-standing structural barriers, socioeconomic and technological transformation, as well as economic shocks. More women have been moving into paid work and, increasingly, leadership positions, yet globally societal expectations, employer policies, the legal environment and the availability of care continue to play an important role in the choice of educational tracks and career trajectories. The decade of austerity that followed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis constrained sectors that provide the core of social infrastructure, affecting outcomes for families and primary caregivers - often women - during the pandemic. Geopolitical conflict and climate change both impact women disproportionately. In addition, the projected deepening of the current cost-of-living crisis is also likely to impact women who continue to earn and accumulate wealth at lower levels.

To illuminate important aspects of underlying and emerging trends impacting gender parity trajectories, and given the high risk of an enveloping crisis, this chapter explores the state of gender gaps in the workforce, through complementary data available in the Economy Profiles and new metrics developed in collaboration with LinkedIn, Coursera, Hologic and WTW.

Employment losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been significantly worse for women than for men, unlike other recessions in recent history which have tended to affect male workers relatively more than female workers.¹

At the peak of the pandemic in Q2 of 2020, men's working hours declined by 18.8% while women's working hours declined by 18.1%. However, since then women have suffered a significantly higher loss of working hours than men have globally, as shown in Figure 2.1,

A time-series analysis of gender parity in labour-force participation for a constant sample of 102 countries included in every edition since the inception of the Gender Gap Index shows that global gender parity for labour-force participation had been slowly declining since 2009. The trend however was exacerbated in 2020, when gender parity scores decreased precipitously over two consecutive editions. As a result, in 2022, gender parity stands at 62.9%, the lowest score registered since the Index was first compiled (Figure 2.2).

At a regional level, gender parity in labour-force participation had been evolving on different trajectories since 2013, before dropping markedly in 2021. As can be observed from Figure 2.3, a negative trend is clearer in South Asia as well as Middle East and North Africa, where gender parity in labour-force participation has been declining at a faster pace than in other regions since 2013. In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Europe has seen gender parity in labour-force participation moderately improving, or steadily holding, since 2012.

With the exception of Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, every region had a lower gender parity score in 2022 than in 2012. Central Asia, South Asia, and Middle East and North Africa registered their lowest gender parity scores in 16 years.

Overall, the pandemic has reversed progress on gender parity in labour-force participation, registering the lowest parity score since the index began. This gendered labour-market scarring risks becoming long term. Furthermore, the reduction of women's labour-force participation has important consequences for other dimensions of employment and in the distribution of unpaid work, which affect how women access opportunities in the economic domain, as well as other spheres of life.

Among those workers who continued in the labour force during the pandemic, unemployment rates increased. According to ILO data, at the global level, unemployment rates spiked from 5.4% in quarter 4 of 2019 to 7.9% in quarter 3 of 2020 for men, and 6.8% in 2019 to 9.6% in 2020 in the same quarter for women. While the current unemployment rates for both men and women are higher than pre-pandemic levels, women's unemployment rate in 2021 (7.8%) was higher than that of men (6.5%), as seen in Figure 2.4. Only a partial recovery is expected by 2023.

The disproportionately negative labour market developments for women can be explained partly through sectoral composition of the shock and also by the care burden that fell disproportionately on women as childcare facilities and schools were closed during the pandemic. Lockdowns more strongly affected service-sector jobs - such as in retail, hospitality and food service - that are predominantly held by women.² High-income countries that had increased vaccine availability, among other pandemic recovery strategies, were able to reopen the service sector more quickly and have experienced a relatively speedier recovery of working hours for women since the first quarter of 2021.³

The other determining factor has been the distribution of care work during the pandemic. Time-use surveys carried out in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany show that women disproportionately carried the burden of home-schooling and additional childcare.⁴ A US study suggests that during the first COVID-19 wave in June 2020, 12.7% of mothers versus only 2.8% of fathers were not working due to virus-related childcare issues.⁵ Since then, research suggests there are multiple trends emerging in mothers' vs fathers' labour market outcomes as a consequence of the pandemic. As a result, the last two years have seen a relatively greater reduction for mothers in working hours, an increase in unemployment, as well as relatively greater drops in labour-force participation. According to the ILO, more than 2 million mothers globally left the labour force over the course of 2020.⁶ While both fathers and mothers saw reductions in labour-force participation during the peak of the pandemic, in the United States fathers had effectively made up the ground lost during the pandemic by November 2020, while US mothers' labour-force participation rate was 2.8 percentage points below where it was in November 2019.⁷ This represented a minimal 0.1 percentage point recovery for mothers in the United States, compared to the initial 2.9 percentage point drop recorded in April 2020.

The difference in unpaid care work distribution between men and women had been significant well before the pandemic. Based on an analysis of 33 countries representing 54% of the global working-age population, we find that men's share of time spent in unpaid work as a proportion of time spent in total work is 19%. This is one-third the share of time women spent in unpaid work (as a proportion of total work), which is 55%.⁸ Recent data collected during the pandemic shows that the reported increases in care work caused by school and care infrastructure closures created pronounced disparities. Women with children under six years of age, for example, absorbed a disproportionate amount of unpaid care work compared to men, as represented in Figure 2.5.

High-frequency Linkedin data for 22 countries shows that in recent years women have been establishing businesses at a slightly higher average rate than men. The share of women founders has doubled in the past five years, while the share of men founders has increased by 55%. As illustrated by Figure 2.6, the trend has continued during and since the pandemic started and included a 43% jump in the founding rate for women between 2019 and 2020. Some portion of this number includes "necessity founders" emerging from the pandemic, with one of the reported drivers of self-employment during this period being job scarcity.⁹ At the same time, evidence suggests that not all founding activity was driven by necessity. During the pandemic, the number of unicorn companies owned by women increased nearly five-fold, from 18 in 2020 to 83 in 2021.¹⁰ This represents 14% of the 595 companies that joined the Crunchbase Unicorn Board in 2021. However, this upwards shift manifests in a context where the dollar investment in women-owned businesses still represents a minor share of the amount directed towards men-founded businesses. In 2019, the percentage of total investment in all-female businesses was 3%, having dropped 4% from 2018. In 2020, that number decreased further to 2% and remained at 2% in 2021. In contrast, the volume of deals involving all-female businesses remained steady at 6%, as did the share of seed investment (also at 6%), over the course of the first year of the pandemic.

The broader labour-force participation data encompasses wider sectoral trends. The Global Gender Gap Index data measures the share of women and men who occupy professional and technical roles as well as senior official and manager roles. Women's share of senior and leadership roles has seen a steady global increase over the past five years (2017-2022). In 2022, global gender parity for this category reached 42.7%, the highest gender parity score yet.

Complementing these statistics, high-frequency data from LinkedIn for 155 countries explores women's representation in leadership, providing a snapshot of gender parity in business leadership in 2022. Overall, the global share of women in leadership roles as illustrated in this data is 31%, although shares vary by industry. In 2022, only select industries have levels near gender parity in leadership, such as Non-Governmental and Membership Organizations (47%), Education (46%), and Personal Services and Wellbeing (45%). At the other end of the range are Energy (20%), Manufacturing (19%) and Infrastructure (16%). The industry breakdown is shown in Figure 2.7.

However, the share of women in leadership has been increasing over time. As presented in Figure 2.8, women have been hired into leadership roles in increasing numbers since 2016. While the share of women hired into leadership was 33.3% in 2016 in this set of countries, it increased to 36.9% in 2022. Progress stalled during the pandemic, with the annual share of women hired into leadership positions holding at 35% between 2019 and 2020 but then increasing to 36% in 2021.

There is significant variation across industries in the rates of hiring women into leadership. On average, more women were hired into leadership in industries where women were already highly represented. Similarly, more men were higher into leadership positions in industries over-represented by men. Among the industries that hired the highest share of women into leadership positions in 2021 are Non-governmental and Membership Organizations (54%), Education (49%), Government and Public Sector (46%), Personal Services and Wellbeing (46%), Healthcare and Care Services (46%), and Media and Communications (46%). The first five are industries in which women's representation is generally higher than men's overall. In contrast, six industries hired significantly more men than women into leadership positions in 2021: Technology (30%), Agriculture (28%), Energy (25%), Supply Chain and Transportation (25%), Manufacturing (22%) and Infrastructure (21%). These are also the industries with the lowest share of female representation in the overall makeup of the industry.

Nonetheless, some industries are seeing an acceleration in their hiring of women into leadership. Relative to 2016, the industries showing the biggest improvement in their hiring rate for women into leadership are Technology, Energy, and Supply Chain and Transportation, as shown in Figure 2.9.

Industries with already high female representation still show a gender gap between the overall female representation across all roles and the representation of women in leadership. For example, women make up 62% of total workforce share in the Personal Services and Wellbeing industry, but only 45% of leadership share. This trend is mirrored in the Real Estate and Healthcare industries, which see a 16-percentage point difference between female representation in the industry and in leadership. While hiring more women at the entry level is an important component of closing gender gaps in leadership, it is not fully sufficient.

The private sector is not the only one where women's leadership has been on the rise. Longitudinal data from the Global Gender Gap Index shows that the global average share of women in ministerial positions nearly doubled between 2006 and 2022, increasing from 9.9% to 16.1%. In 2022, the countries that have the highest shares of women ministers are Belgium (57.1%), Nicaragua (58.8%) and Sweden (57.1%). Similarly, the global average share of women in parliament rose from 14.9% to 22.9%, with Mexico (50%), Nicaragua (50.6%) and Rwanda (61.3%) having the highest shares of women in parliament.

Furthermore, the highest level of public office, head of state, has been held in increasing numbers by women over the past 50 years, as can be observed in Figure 2.10. As the figure shows, women's top political leadership has not increased at a constant rate, nor has it risen equally across regions.

Regions that had a comparatively larger share of representation in the early 70s - such as South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa - have since seen a waning share of women as heads of state. In contrast, women\'s (share of time in) leadership in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia and the Pacific has been growing. In North America there was only one female head of state in the past 50 years. Of all female heads of state in the past 50 years, the longest-serving ones have presided over Germany for 16.1 years, Iceland for 16 years, Dominica for 14.9 years and Ireland for 14 years.

Skewed labour-market outcomes, including those described in the previous sections, can have an outsized impact on female wealth accumulation when projected over the course of a working trajectory for men and women. In addition, unequal access and control over wealth-building resources - such as banking, investment, inheritance and property - can contribute to the wealth divide.

A World Economic Forum collaboration with WTW analysed wealth equity across 39 countries and found that women are at a disadvantage with regards to wealth accumulation over the span of their working life. For frontline operational roles, the overall gender wealth gap amounts to 11%; for professional and technical type roles, the gender wealth gap nearly triples, to 31%; and for senior expert and leadership roles it expands further to 38% in the countries considered by WTW. The most salient factors contributing to gender-based wealth inequity are gender pay gaps, unequal career progression trajectories, gender gaps in financial literacy, and life events that typically influence women's participation in paid work and their ability to contribute to wealth accumulation.¹²

As women are under-represented in higher paid positions, the amount they can direct towards savings and investments, and the corresponding earning-based contributions to wealth, is often lower than that of men. In addition, specific life events related to care responsibilities, part-time work and career breaks affect women disproportionately compared to men, as they lower the rate of workforce participation and/or time spent in employment - also affecting their employment-based contributions accordingly.

Life events relating to care had the most significant impact on gender wealth equity across nearly all the 39 countries included in the analysis. For example, as presented in Figure 2.11, caring for a child has a large impact on women's capacity to build wealth in Argentina, Nigeria and Mexico. These findings mirror in part the asymmetry of unpaid care work that persists in these countries. For example, in Argentina women spend 28% of their day doing unpaid care work, whereas men only dedicate 9% to it. In Mexico, men spend 11% of their day doing care work compared to women, who devote 28%.¹³ However, when considering the combined impact of all factors on gender wealth gaps, some of the most equal economies with wealth equity at 80% and above are South Korea, Spain, Austria, Japan, Taiwan (China), Norway, Israel and Denmark while the most unequal economies with less than 65% of wealth equity are Nigeria, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey and India.

Further, in the absence of adequate care infrastructure and with persisting gender differences in leave provisions, the disproportionate share of unpaid care work that women assume can add to the challenges of generating wealth. This raises an important question relating to the role that purpose-driven leadership and programs, equitable total rewards (pay, benefits, careers), good work standards,¹⁴ comprehensive social infrastructure, expanded and equitable provisions for care-related events, and accessible financial instruments can play as gender equalizing and redistributive instruments for workers in standard and non-standard employment.

In the last five years, women worldwide have been enrolling in and graduating from tertiary education degrees at increasing rates. In addition, the distribution of learners by field in 2019 showed that tertiary education continued to be segregated by gender. For example, between 2013 and 2019, the gender gap in ICT and Engineering and Manufacturing remained mostly intact. Women's participation in Health and Welfare fields decreased, in contrast to Education.

As illustrated in Figure 2.12, the fields where women continue to be overrepresented compared to men include Education and Health and Welfare. In contrast, women are underrepresented in STEM fields, and the gender gap is most prevalent in two fields: Information and Communication Technologies and Engineering and Manufacturing.

The digitalization of the global economy, further accelerated by the pandemic, has allowed distance learning solutions to multiply and provide a range of options for basic, higher and lifelong education. However, only economies with the infrastructure, internet access, computer literacy and time availability have been able to support the transition of a broad learner base into online courses.¹⁵ Nonetheless, online learning is more widespread since the start of the pandemic, particularly among adult learners seeking to complete, complement or supplement training.¹⁶ Women increased their participation in this space significantly, according to high frequency data from Coursera.

As illustrated in Figures 2.13.A-D, gender gaps are substantially smaller in online enrolment than in traditional tertiary education for selected countries, when comparing online Coursera enrollment with traditional tertiary education data from the OECD. However, in both online and traditional formats, men continue to be overrepresented in fields typically characterized as "male-dominated", with two STEM fields reporting the highest gender gaps: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Engineering, Manufacturing, and Construction. However, in economies like India and Saudi Arabia, the ICT STEM gap is wider in online education than in traditional education.

The data further reveals that gender parity increased in online training in ICT in several economies between 2019 and 2021 (Figures 2.13.c and 2.13.d). Online ICT enrolments for women increased from 9.2% of total enrolments to 16.1% in Saudi Arabia and had slight increases in India, from 23.8 to 24.8%. The share of women enrolled in ICT in Greece almost doubled, from 8.6 to 15.8%. Similarly, the share of women enrolled in ICT in Hungary rose almost seven percentage points, from 12.0 to 18.7%. In Canada, Chile, Finland and Brazil, however, the gender gap in ICT in online education increased from 2019 to 2021.

Conversely, the overall gender gap for online training in Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction increased across most economies between 2019 and 2021 (Figures 2.13.a and 2.13.b), with two exceptions. In Japan, the female share remained stable at 2.2% but the male share decreased from 3.5 to 2.9%. In Latvia, the female share fell from 2.1 to 1.5% while the male share dipped from 4.5 to 2.6%. In Saudi Arabia, the converse was true - female share of enrolments rose in higher proportion than the male share, from 1.9 to 2.2% compared to 6.1 to 6.3% for men.

However, even as women in many countries have begun to match men's participation in online learning since the pandemic, a significant gender gap remains in the distribution of enrolment preferences across skills. While both men and women upskill in valuable areas of competency - such as Problem Solving, Resource Management and Marketing - for the future job market, they nonetheless emerge with gendered learning profiles. Broadly speaking, men are more likely to invest in Digital and Innovation skills and women are more likely to choose to upskill in Working with People and Self-Management skills (Figure 2.14a). The picture comes into sharper focus at the more granular level 3 of Coursera's Global Skills Taxonomy: women are substantially more likely to upskill in Resilience, Stress Tolerance, and Flexibility, and men are twice as likely to choose to upskill in Technology Use, Technology Design, and Mathematical Thinking (Figure 2.14b).

Enrolment data from Coursera suggests that increasing diversity of instructors may engage more women learners. Women learners enroll more than men in courses taught by women instructors: 49% of enrollments from women learners were in courses with women instructors, compared to 38% for men learners.

There are also gender gaps when it comes to reported skills among those in leadership roles. Linkedin data for skills displayed by those in leadership roles such as Director, VP, CXO and Partner in the 155 countries included in the data sample shows that, on average, both men and women attribute the highest relative importance to industry-specific skills by an almost equal measure. However, women tend to back up their industry knowledge with business skills, to which they attribute higher relative importance than men. Men tend to rely more on technology skills and disruptive technology skills than women to demonstrate leadership (Figure 2.15b). Lastly, the skills that are least displayed by women and men leaders on their profiles are attitudinal skills. However, attitudinal skills have higher relative importance as a leadership quality in women's skills profiles than they do in men's, regardless of the industry (Figure 2.15a).

Between 1990 and 2019, the global prevalence of mental, anxiety and depressive disorders in women increased in higher proportion than it did for men, which is having a disproportionately larger impact on girls as young as 15-19. In 2019, mental disorders became the seventh-leading cause of disability-adjusted life-years, which has increased the proportion and gender disparity in the global disease burden derived from mental conditions.¹⁷

Data from Hologic documented the levels of negative emotions - stress, sadness, worry and anger - that men and women were experiencing in 2020 and 2021 as a proportion of their overall health. The data shows that between 2020 and 2021, overall levels of stress, sadness, worry and anger increased by 1% among women, and were 4% higher in women than in men.

Data in Figure 2.16 shows that in 2021, high levels of stress were reported by men and women who were unemployed. Between 2020 and 2021 stress increased for most women regardless of employment status: self-employed women (+4 percentage-points), women in part-time employment not seeking full-time employment (+4 percentage-points), as well as women who are out of the workforce and unemployed (+3 percentage points). The one category in which stress among women decreased was among those employed part-time and seeking full-time work. Conversely, that was the only category of men whose stress increased between 2020 and 2021. For men in all other categories of employment, stress decreased in 2021.

Closing gender gaps remains a critical driver of national prosperity. Countries that invest in all of their human capital and make it easier for their populations to balance work and family life tend to be more prosperous. We find a positive relationship between gender parity and per capita income when comparing the Global Gender Gap Index and GDP per capita (see Figure 2.17). While the relationship does not show causality, regardless of current income level, countries should invest in closing gender gaps in access, resources and opportunities. With an increasingly uncertain economic outlook, unleashing the creativity and dynamism of a country's entire human capital is critical to overcoming the current crises and accelerating a recovery.

1. Javorcik, 2021.

2. Alon, et al, 2021.

3. ILO, 2022a.

4. Adams-Prassl, et al, 2020.

5. Russell and Sun, 2020.

6. ILO, 2022b.

7. Boesch, et al, 2021.

8. OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development), Employment database. Countries included in the sample are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, China, India and South Africa. Accessed June 2022.

9. GEM, 2021.

10. Teare, 2022.

11. Teare, 2020.

12. The analysis covered 39 countries. The analysis projected wealth accumulation through the length of a career cycle starting from age 22 to a common state retirement age - based on the male state retirement age in the country, to enhance comparability. Wealth arising from state and mandatory retirement benefits, private retirement plans, real estate and personal savings were considered. There are numerous exogenous variables that directly or indirectly impact relative wealth (for example, inherited wealth, differences in the application of taxes between men and women, and educational access and attainment) that were not modelled in this study. As a result, the analysis offers a baseline for wealth projections across different countries that can be enriched and expanded by accounting for the factors that contribute to wealth creation in each context.

13. World Bank, 2022.

14. World Economic Forum, 2022.

15. UNESCO, 2020.

16. OECD, 2020.

17. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2022.

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Boesch, Tyler, Rob Grunewald, Ryan Nunn and Vanessa Palmer, Pandemic Pushes Mothers of Young Children Out of the Labour Force, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2 February 2021, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/pandemic-pushes-mothers-of-young-children-out-of-the-labor-force#_ftn1[.]{.underline}

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OECD (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development), The Potential of Online Learning for Adults: Early Lessons from the COVID-19 Crisis, OECD Policy Responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19), 2020, https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/the-potential-of-online-learning-for-adults-early-lessons-from-the-covid-19-crisis-ee040002/.

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----, "The Herd Of Female-Founded Unicorn Companies Continues To Grow in 2022'", Crunchbase News, 21 March 2022, https://news.crunchbase.com/news/top-women-led-unicorn-companies-startups-2022/.

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