This chapter offers insights into the complex picture of economic gender disparities, equipping decision-makers to address gender gaps in a targeted and transformative manner. The first section provides an outlook of the current global economic and regulatory context which is shaping gender parity outcomes. The second section provides a more focused analysis of global workforce dynamics, leadership trends and skill development across various industries and over time. Building on the 2023 report, the chapter provides continued tracking of key labour-market outcomes, particularly in the face of technological transitions, as well as novel explorations of underlying layers contributing to gender gaps, including patterns in professional networks, care provision and perceptions of opportunity.

The progressive breakdown of political, environmental and economic configurations is creating high-risk, high vulnerability conditions for women and girls, in turn diminishing prospects of a global recovery. The unequal participation of women in the global economy will only worsen an already suboptimal long-term growth rate: the World Bank’s January 2024 Global Economic Prospects Report predicted that the latter years of the current decade will be characterized by the slowest GDP growth rate in 30 years. Moreover, rising income inequality in both advanced and emerging economies increases the vulnerability that low-income women and girls face in the context of climate change and ongoing political stagnation.

Already in 2022, an estimated 15% of women worldwide were living within 50 kilometres of armed conflict – a condition that contributes to the worsening of women’s outcomes in health, economic participation, educational attainment and political empowerment. Climate crises are also becoming numerous and frequent and are deemed to increase a range of inequities – from women’s reproductive health outcomes to potentially pushing nearly 158 million women and girls into poverty in the next 25 years.

While the threat of continued downturns and prolonged crises are a worrying prospect for gender parity, global efforts to close the gender gap should be motivated by the boundless possibilities offered from increased economic and leadership parity. International financial institutions have noted the economic gains that could be reaped from enhanced female participation in labour markets and economies. The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in employment and entrepreneurship could increase global GDP by more than 20%, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has categorized the correction of the “misallocation” of women’s talents and abilities as a method for boosting productivity.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a precipitous decline in global economic activity, which led to reduced government revenues. In parallel, almost all governments injected large fiscal stimuli into economies. While public spending levels of 2020 fell rapidly in 2021 and 2022, high debt levels and interest payments – particularly for low- and middle-income countries – are increasingly a concern. The growing cost of debt service threatens to erode fiscal space needed for investment into educational, retraining and reskilling, and childcare programmes associated with higher rates of women’s labour-force participation.

The estimated investment required for achieving gender equality for all developing economies could reach up to $7.8 trillion per year, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The estimated collective financial investment required to achieve this goal by 2030, at the current rate of government expenditure, would be $360 billion per year. The necessary level of financial effort requires a fundamental shift in mindset for economies, understanding gender parity efforts as engines for new, high-quality growth.

Business, in turn, has shown a mixed approach to advancing gender parity in the current economic and political context. While diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) spending and policies have seen retrenchment in some parts of the world due to political polarization and economic pressures, in many regions, including Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia, gender parity efforts are gathering momentum. In Northern America and Europe, companies which have long been committed to DEI have been staying the course, continuing to proactively address gender gaps in their workforce, across business functions and in their wider ecosystems. Experiencing the benefits of increased productivity, adaptability to change, returns on investment and stronger innovation outcomes, they are starting to see gender parity as a competitive advantage in an increasingly tough macro and business environment. At the same time, though, beyond the DEI frontier the aggregate picture across all firms still shows systematic regression in parity as economic conditions worsen (see following sections).

According to the World Bank, in 2024 men continue to enjoy more legal protections than women. For this reason, developments in the adoption of gender policies across economies cannot be minimized or dismissed, especially since implementation gaps are widespread. A clear example of this emerges in economic gender policy. Since 1971, the number of countries that have adopted pay equity laws has increased from 2 to 98, with regional differences in uptake of such laws. However, only one in five economies that have legislated equal pay for equal work have also implemented mechanisms to redress the pay gap.

Most governments have yet to make gender a systematic feature and focus of their budgetary cycle. Since the 1984 launch of the first gender budget initiative in Australia, the uptake in efforts has extended to over 100 countries. However, while over 90% of countries examined by a recent UN Women report having policies and programmes to address gender equality, only 53% of them also report having sufficient resources allocated for that purpose. What is more, only a minority of countries present government expenditures by gender, obscuring potential cues to how the bulk of government spending can address gender gaps.

Nonetheless, 2023 did see policy developments on key issue for economic parity: the care economy. In October, the UN General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution on the centrality of care and support from a human rights perspective. In Latin America, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights has since discussed the right to care, contributing to broader recognition of the economic relevance of care.

In the spring of 2024, the short-term global economic outlook shows signs of reserved optimism. The IMF has revised its global 2024 growth projections to a slightly improved 3.1% on account of economic resilience. While economic slowdown is underway in large economies, fiscal consolidation measures are expected to be reduced or at least delayed beyond 2024 – resulting in a potential increase in public expenditure and with it, economic activity. Inflation is expected to soften, although neither systematically across economies nor permanently. This economic configuration can impact gender parity in an array of ways. Lower inflation and increased government expenditure can expand economic possibilities for women, especially when constrained by lower-paying jobs and sectors.

Continuing a pattern of recovery that was highlighted in last year’s edition, parity in the labour-force participation rate has rebounded past 2023 levels (63.5%) to reach 65.7%, based on the constant sample of 101 economies tracked since 2006, as shown in Figure 2.2. However, segments of the global workforce were affected disproportionately during pandemic years, leaving behind what the International Labour Organization (ILO) has deemed “pockets of missing workers” in low-income economies.

In the United States, the number of women in the job market hit a historic high. The U.S. Department of Labour identified remote work as a key driver of women’s return to the workforce, particularly for working mothers. However, the lack of fully functioning childcare systems curtails optimism associated with this development.

At the regional level, the effect is visibly positive for Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where gender parity values rise to 42.6% and 83.9%, respectively, in 2024, suggesting parity in labour-force participation is recovered or nearly recovered from shocks that happened at the turn of the decade. In both regions, women’s participation rate in the labour force has increased in greater proportion than men’s since 2020.

In Northern America and Europe, where gender parity in labour-force participation rate has been comparably higher, the recent upturn shows a moderate improvement since 2022, reaching 84.6% and 77.4% respectively. This is linked to men’s labour-force participation rate increasing modestly in Europe, while remaining flat in Northern America since 2021. However, the upwards push in women’s workforce participation has not been large enough to reach prior levels of progress. In Middle East and Northern Africa, gender parity in labour-force participation rate is lowest of all regions (28%) on average and has been in decline since 2019, when it reached 30.8%. This reflects a significant drop in female participation rates prior to 2020 that have only since begun to increase. Exceptions are Saudi Arabia, where female labour-force participation has nearly doubled over time, from 22.5% in 2006 to 43.2% in 2024, as well as Bahrain and the UAE which have also seen significant increases since 2006.

Employment rates are mirroring positive developments in women’s labour-force participation. In the OECD area, 2024 employment rates reached record numbers for both men and women. Women’s employment rate increased at a faster rate than men’s, leading to a reduction in the gender gap. In Europe, the profile of the labour force has also shifted to include a larger share of female, older, highly educated workers. Labour mobility in the eurozone, subsidized childcare and family leave policies, job-retention schemes, and delayed retirement are among the factors considered to contribute to this outcome.

While positive strides in employment are encouraging, the sustainability of such progress remains uncertain. The ILO cautions that global unemployment is expected to rise in lower-income economies, potentially leading to heightened poverty rates.

Moreover, the ILO has continued to underscore the need to address the gendered jobs gap, a recent indicator developed by the organization that describes individuals seeking employment that do not have a job – including unemployed, potential labour force and those willing to work but not available at short notice. As women are often more constrained in the speed at which they can take up new employment opportunities (e.g. due to care obligations), they are less likely to be considered as unemployed based on current criteria but remain in the pool of those experiencing a job gap. Initial ILO estimates were included in the 2023 edition of the Global Gender Gap Report, evidencing how the jobs gap rate was significantly higher for women. The most recent ILO estimates suggest that while gender parity in the jobs gap measure has stayed relatively stable in 2024, the absolute proportion of women experiencing a jobs gap is much higher than initially projected, at 21% (vs 14.5% projected for 2023) while the rate for men is 14% (vs 9.8% projected for 2023).

Breaking down global labour-market data to the industry level, data provided by LinkedIn shows that in 2024 women’s representation in the workforce remains well below men’s, across almost every industry and economy analysed.

The sample, which consists of LinkedIn users across 166 economies, indicates that women account for 42% of the global workforce (compared to a 40.5% global average based on ILO reported figures; it should be noted that LinkedIn captures only a segment of the global labour market). LinkedIn data for the past eight years shows that women’s overall representation in the workforce has slightly decreased in the past two years, regressing to 2018 levels (Figure 2.4).

By comparison, women’s representation in senior leadership has fared slightly better, with a less pronounced drop compared to previous years (Figure 2.4). LinkedIn data for the past eight years shows that women increased their representation in leadership, from a 30.4% share in 2016 to a 32% share in 2023. However, data for the first quarter of 2024 suggests an early -0.3-point reduction in representation, bringing the share of women in leadership down to 31.7%.

Differences in the gender composition across different industries’ overall workforce and leadership continue to contribute to women’s segregation across industries.

In 2024, women make up most workers in Healthcare and Care Services (62.1%), Education (54.4%), Consumer Services (53.1%), and Government and Public Sector (50.7%). In contrast, women have the lowest presence in Utilities (31.5%); Supply, Chain and Transportation (31.6%); Oil, Gas, and Mining (24.1%); and Infrastructure (22.4%).

Comparing women’s representation across industries over time shows there has been an overall positive evolution since 2016 (Figure 2.5). The share of women in the following industries has grown incrementally: Government and Public Service (from 48.3% to 50.7%), Professional Services (from 40.2% to 41.4%), Infrastructure (from 21.3% to 22.4%), Education (from 53.3% to 54.4%) and Utilities (from 30.5% to 31.5%).

However, women’s share of the workforce has been trending slightly downwards at the aggregate level since 2023, and in eight industries since 2022. Between 2023 and 2024, the industries which experienced the greatest decline in women’s workforce participation were Accommodation and Food (from 44.2% to 43.5%), Consumer Services (from 53.7% to 53.1%), Wholesale (from 33.3% to 32.7%), Real Estate (from 42.2% to 41.7%) and Retail (from 49% to 48.5%).

Women’s representation in senior leadership has seen modest improvements since 2016, with more women in senior leadership across every industry in 2024 than in 2016 (Figure 2.5). Over this period, the share of leadership roles held by women saw the largest increases in Government and Public Services (from 39.4% to 41.8%), Professional Services (28.1% to 30.3%), Utilities (22.5% to 24.8%) and Financial Services (from 27.5% to 29.7%). Despite the progress recorded between 2016 and 2024, the period between 2023 and 2024 saw moderate declines across all industries, with relatively more pronounced changes in Consumer Services (from 42.1% in 2023 to 41.6% in 2024), Retail (from 35.3% to 35%), Technology (from 26.7% to 26.4%) and Wholesale (from 23.1% to 22.8%).

One significant implication arising from the unequal proportion of women across industries is its reinforcement of other gender disparities in the workforce. Disproportionate representation of women in certain sectors has been documented as one of several factors contributing to gender pay gaps. In industries where women account for a higher share of the labour force, pay tends to be lower. The reverse is also true: industries in which women are less represented tend to be higher-paying.

Women’s concentration in lower-paid industries, in combination with women‘s lower representation in leadership roles, is a disadvantageous coupling of conditions affecting women’s access to economic prosperity and opportunity to build wealth throughout their working lives. Top-level positions remain narrowly accessible for women, globally speaking, illustrated by the disaggregation of data by seniority levels in the metric introduced in the last edition as the global “drop to the top”.

In 2024, the ascent to the C-suite globally is steeped in deeply entrenched inequalities, resulting in an overall –21.5 percentage point drop from the base to the top. Women make up 46% of entry-level roles, a figure that has remained stable since 2023 and remains virtually unchanged in 2024. Globally, while women are close to occupying nearly half of entry-level positions, they fall short of representing just one quarter of C-suite roles. Across all industries, career progression remains limited, although the trend exhibits industry-specific patterns.

Industries with a majority female entry-level workforce exhibit relatively lower drops in female representation at the highest levels of organizations (Table 2.1). Consumer Services, Education, and Government and Public Sector are the three industries in which it appears relatively easier for women to climb, as C-suite-to-entry-level ratios are relatively high, at 62%, 59% and 59%, respectively. Of the female-dominated industries, Healthcare and Care Services exhibits the sharpest drop to the top (54%): over half of the female talent at the base (67.4%) does not reach the highest levels within the industry (36.7%). The sectors where women undergo a more significant drop are Real Estate (C-suite-to-entry-level ratio of 43%), Financial Services (44%), and Supply Chain and Transportation (46%).

Women’s progression across the career ladder often reflects broader shifts in organizational attitudes towards workforce parity, which are discernible from the evolution of women’s recruitment into leadership roles.

Past editions of the report celebrated a promising trend in the increased hiring rate of women into leadership roles in the lead to, and during the first years of, the COVID-19 pandemic. After reaching a hiring rate of 37.5%, the positive trend began to deteriorate in 2023. As Figure 2.8 shows, the last two years have shown that an increasingly smaller proportion of leadership hires are women, bringing both the 2023 hiring rate (36.9%) and the early 2024 hiring rate (36.4%) below 2021 levels.

The change in sectoral hiring rates since 2016 shows that the retrenchment is common across most industries. Only in four industries have hiring rates for women in leadership remained neutral or positive since the last edition: Utilities; Oil, Gas, and Mining; Hospitals and Healthcare; and Accommodation and Food Services (Figure 2.9).

Recent research by LinkedIn suggests that there exists an important relationship between hiring rates of women into senior leadership and macro-economic conditions which can explain the regression in hiring rates observed over the last two editions of the report. The authors find that worsening labour-market conditions are systematically associated with smaller shares of senior leadership hires being women.

The relationship is especially pronounced in industries with under 50% female representation in the workforce and is not the result of fewer women applying to such roles. Figure 2.10 illustrates this heterogeneity in the labour market tightness-hiring rate relationship across industry and country contexts with varying levels of women’s representation. The effect is most pronounced in industries such as Oil, Gas and Mining as well as Construction. These results suggests that the higher women’s representation in the workforce is, the greater the resilience of progress achieved.

2024 has been deemed to be the “biggest global election year in history”, with the largest global population in history coming to vote in over 60 national elections, including some of the world’s most populous economies: Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan and the United States.

Across economies included in the 2024 Global Gender Gap Index, there are 25 women heads of state in office across 24 economies. Uniquely, in Barbados, both the prime minister and president positions are held by women. Between March 2023 and March 2024, the representatives of Finland, France, Hungary, Nepal, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, and Tunisia left office. During the same period, only two women assumed head-of-state roles in Latvia and Trinidad and Tobago. Notably, in Trinidad and Tobago, a female head of state succeeded the outgoing incumbent.

Over the past 50 years, nearly half (47.2%) of economies tracked by the Global Gender Gap Index have had at least one woman in top political office. The longest-serving female heads of state remain Angela Merkel of Germany, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir of Iceland and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, each serving over 15 years. Among top political leaders leaving office in 2023, burnout was cited as a contributing factor by Jacinda Ardern, Sanna Marin and Nicola Sturgeon. This is an element worth noting on account of the growing notice on the effects of political violence against women in political parity, as well as the fact that over half of the global population reporting gender bias against women in political leadership, according to UNDP.³⁴

Gender parity at the parliamentary level stands at a record high of 33% in 2024, having nearly doubled since 2006 (18.8%). At the regional level, Latin America demonstrates continuous improvement over time, while Central Asia shows declining parity rates in recent editions. Some of the economies exerting influence over the overall positive global trajectory include United Arab Emirates, which has maintained parity since 2021, followed by Costa Rica, which has recorded a parity score of 90% for the past three editions. Bolivia, Denmark and Spain have also reached parity levels of over 80% on this indicator in 2024.

At lower levels of political leadership, women’s hold in decision-making is increasing. United Nations data shows that the share of women elected to local government has been rising slowly in the past four years, from 33.9% to 35.5% in 2023. Out of the economies reporting 2023 values for this indicator following elections in 2022, those with the highest proportion of women participating in local government are Iceland (51.3%), Senegal (47.2%) and Sweden (44.2%). Across the same subset of economies, only in Jordan, Bahrain and Oman did the share of women in local government diminish significantly, by -6.9, -3.3, and -2.7 percentage points, respectively.

World Economic Forum calculations find that increases in women’s representation in local government and legislatures, as well as economies political parity scores, are in part driven by quotas. The trend will be tested anew in 2024 across 47 parliamentary chambers that are holding elections and use gender quotas.

The following section provides new insights into some of the layers underlying the outcomes described in the preceding sections. Two factors in particular which are critical for positive career trajectories, professional networks, and support in the provision of care, are examined in more detail below.

Gender parity in the workforce can be advanced formally, by design: for example, through implementing quotas, targets and policies to drive up representation. However, informal factors also influence promotion, retention, and progression into leadership. Professional networks are essential in this context, as they provide immaterial resources and capital to bridge professional gaps. Economic networks create benefits not just for individuals, but also for organizations, industries, and economies at large. Networks are considered important to provide access to job, mentorship, and sponsorship opportunities, as well as exchanges leading to innovation and the adoption of best practices. As such, it is interesting to consider the role professional networks can play in replicating, or subverting, dynamics contributing to gender inequality, such as workforce mobility.

As with other social structures, online networks carry over gender designs that translate to economic opportunity, or the lack thereof. Initial explorations into the gender gaps in online professional networks show that in nearly all economies analysed (97%), men have larger LinkedIn networks than women, and in two out of three economies, men make new connections at a faster rate than women (25.7%). Early insights suggest that gender differences are narrowing over time, with women’s networks growing in size, albeit at a slower rate than men’s.

In addition to differences in size, men’s networks also show slightly “stronger” ties between connections (+3.3% closure coefficient) in 70% of economies.³⁸ In comparison, women have more “weak” ties, which have been linked to job mobility; similarly, men’s networks are more dispersed on average than women’s (lower clustering coefficient). (Figure 2.12) LinkedIn research on United States networks suggests that differences in network strength are driven by, among other factors, occupation and seniority, and impact job and economic outcomes. Stronger networks are associated with increased probability of career progression and receive more recruiter outreach.

These findings provide initial insights into the state of gender parity in online networks and offer an overview of opportunity outside of the restraints of traditional networks and their respective, longstanding gender inequities. Advancements in technology are creating new features and opportunities to diversify professional networks. Enhanced job search is facilitating standardized skill listing and recognition, enabling AI engines to match skill profiles to opportunities – including those of non-traditional candidates. Additionally, online platforms offer insights into career trajectories and necessary skillsets for desired roles, providing new avenues to close gender gaps in the labour force.

The last two editions of the report explored the hard-hitting effects the pandemic had on women’s workforce participation, including how a disproportionate surge in caregiving responsibilities contributed to women’s exit from the labour force. With women’s-labour force participation remaining lower than men’s, the role of equitable care systems becomes a key concern for both government and business as they explore strategies to meet the needs of a changing population beyond existing and insufficient frameworks. New data offering insights into childcare provisions worldwide offers a useful departure point for the analysis of one core issue in care systems.

World Bank data suggest only two thirds (65%) of economies guarantee at least 14 weeks of paid leave for mothers, with fathers also having some form of paid leave in these instances. All European and Central Asian economies meet or exceed protections for women. However, nearly two-thirds of economies in MENA fall short of guaranteeing minimum leave duration. Additionally, the majority of MENA and Central Asian economies do not provide paternity leave.

Further differences emerge between regions based on how provisions are funded. Benefits that are exclusively publicly funded are only available in 51% of economies worldwide, with the biggest funding gaps happening in 70% of economies in MENA, Eastern Asia and the Pacific and Southern Asia. In the absence of public and private investment in childcare, and under longstanding unequal attitudes towards care activities at large, the economic and social cost of caregiving is borne predominantly by women.

In 2022, businesses estimate that men and women do not participate equitably in caregiving (children or elders) overall, according to World Economic Forum surveys. The perception that men and women spend unequal amounts of time in caregiving is particularly pronounced in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. The opposite is true for Northern America and Central Asia, where survey respondents estimate that time spent in caregiving is more gender-equal.

Nevertheless, attitudes and frameworks for care are evolving alongside the growing demand for broader care provision, with governments expanding frameworks and businesses increasing their benefits offer. One example of this shift is evidenced by the state of parental leave benefits. Over the past 50 years, the average number of maternity leave days in 2024 has nearly doubled from 1971, from 63 to 107 in Global Gender Gap Index countries (Figure 2.13). In the same sample, average paternity leave has increased from less than half a day (0.2) to over 9 days. While paternity leave represents a small fraction of maternity leave allocations (9.1%), it has increased more significantly over time, despite the absence of international conventions recommending a minimum paternity-leave allocation such as those adopted for maternity-leave allocations.

These developments are crucial when considering how leave allocations, in addition to being an essential workforce protection, can be instruments for improved workforce parity. World Bank research has found that extending the duration of maternity leave is linked to a reduction of women’s participation in the workforce. Furthermore, the data suggests that parental parity is in fact positively correlated with higher female labour-force participation. Achieving workforce gender parity, therefore, requires governments and businesses to facilitate for the adoption and exercise of equitable parental leave, ensuring childcare responsibilities are shared equitably.

For governments, this would mean addressing the policy gap in childcare, which is estimated by the ILO to leave parents without care provision for 4.2 years until children can enrol in school. Businesses in turn would need to increase provision of leave benefits, currently as low as 36% and 31% for mothers and fathers, respectively. Further actions are needed beyond childcare if workers are to be supported as informal caregivers and/or as formal care workers. Global demand for care provision is rising across economies, as is the demand for care workers. As a consequence, the importance of care skills and occupations is also increasing, and with it, the space for investment in the care economy.

This section offers insights into the gaps that are skewing the ongoing technology transition. It presents a renewed stocktake on the state of parity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) leadership, representation, and skilling, and provides granular insights on critical gender patterns shaping the ever-faster development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI).

Overall, the proportions of women in both the STEM and non-STEM workforce have gradually increased since 2016 (Figure 2.14). However, in 2024 women continue to have lower representation in the STEM workforce than in the non-STEM workforce, with representative shares of 28.2% and 47.3%, respectively. A slight downturn in non-STEM has been observed in early 2024, which is not present in STEM.

The “drop to the top”, illustrated in Figure 2.15, is more pronounced in STEM occupations (C-suite-to entry-level ratio of 42%) compared to non-STEM occupations (46.3%). Between the two, the difference is narrowest – only 6.7 percentage points – at the director level.

From an industry perspective, gender gaps in representation are present across all economic sectors. While there is variability in the shares of women in STEM employment across industries, women are systematically underrepresented in STEM employment in comparison to men (Figure 2.16). Furthermore, women are overrepresented in non-STEM occupations across all industries. This configuration gives women a double disadvantage with regards to technological and workforce transitions, as they continue to occupy the lower-growth, lower-paying jobs that are likely to be negatively affected in the short term.

With technology adoption expected to play a primary role in business transformation in the next five years, employers are increasingly looking for workers with technological literacy and engineering skills. In this context, the share of AI talent is evolving – albeit with different gender concentrations. New LinkedIn data offers novel insights into the gendered makeup of AI talent, with a focus on the subset of workers with AI engineering skills. These skills, used to develop and implement AI systems, are contributing to the development of innovative applications across a range of issues – from comprehensive healthcare analytics to predictive infrastructure maintenance.

For AI Engineering, the concentration of female talent has more than doubled since 2016, from .09% to .2% of LinkedIn’s female membership. Male AI talent in 2016 was already tracking higher than women’s and has doubled since then (from 0.18% to 0.41%) but has not outpaced the rate of growth for women’s talent (Figure 2.17).

The share of women with AI Engineering skills has increased overall since 2016. Yet, female AI Engineering talent as a share of the overall industry workforce has a smaller industry presence than male talent in 2023 – and the differences are most pronounced in Education and in Technology, Information, and Media. However, the sectors with the most significant increases in female concentration over time are Technology, Information and Media, followed by Professional Services and Financial Services (Figure 2.18).

Gender representation within AI Engineering also shows a promising trend. While men and women’s concentration of AI talent has been climbing, over the last four years the share of AI talent who are men has decreased with a corresponding increase in the share who are women. Although men still have substantially higher representation for AI talent, the increasing share who are women is a positive signal for improving gender parity. At the industry level, gender parity in AI industry representation has increased gradually in Education; Professional Services; Manufacturing; and Technology, Information and Media. Only in Financial Services has gender parity in AI Engineering declined since 2016.

Fostering system-level resilience in the face of evolving job landscapes hinges on empowering individuals to cultivate a diverse array of competencies, spanning both human and technological domains, and ensuring their adept application.

Men and women are represented disproportionately in STEM skills across economies, likely mirroring the different conditions driving gendered participation in technological transitions. However, these gaps are evolving differently across countries and over time. While more men list STEM skills compared to women, the share of women with STEM skills has increased since 2016 from 24.4% to 27.1% in less than a decade (Figure 2.19), narrowing the STEM skill gender gap in 62 out of 73 economies.

Data from PwC reveals that a significant proportion of employees – 68% of men and 62% of women – believe they possess a clear understanding of how their job requirements will transform over the next five years. Moreover, a striking 80% of men and 79% of women reported to actively seek opportunities to expand their skillsets.

However, the proactive stance towards skill development is not without gender disparities, as evidenced by the gender gaps in enrolment rates across different skill categories (Figure 2.20).

Within the realm of soft skills, which are pivotal for fostering effective interpersonal dynamics and organizational cohesion, some degree of gender parity is evident. According to data from Coursera, in 2024, skills associated with collaboration and leadership exhibit relatively higher levels of gender balance, such as teaching and mentoring (>100%), empathy and active listening (65%), as well as leadership and social influence (65%). However, despite the higher levels of parity, this edition’s figures show that parity in enrolment rates has declined almost across the board. From a skill category perspective, the most pronounced losses occur in management skills (-11 points from 2022), in cognitive skills (-11 percentage points from 2022) and in working-with-others skills (-21 points from 2022), which include empathy and active listening (-4 percentage points), leadership and social influence (-5 percentage points), and teaching and mentoring (-13 percentage points). Only engagement skills have remained stable since the last edition, with marketing and media (73%) registering a +1 percentage-point improvement and service orientation (58%) remaining unchanged.

Conversely, disparities are becoming more pronounced within the sphere of online skilling in AI and digital skills, which are increasingly shaping the overall skills and job landscape. Despite a notable uptick in enrolment in these courses across genders between 2015 and 2023, and since the last report, certain technical proficiencies – notably in AI and big data (30%), programming (31%) and networks and cybersecurity (31%) – lag in achieving gender parity. These findings underscore the need for targeted interventions to bridge this gap and ensure equitable access to emerging technological competencies, particularly since generative AI is a fast-growing technology with the potential to enable tailored learning experiences fitting the needs of diverse learner populations.

Demand for STEM skills in the economy is increasing overall, yet skilling decisions will depend on an employee’s current role and employer. They will, to an important extent, depend on skills trajectories for any given role, on prospective benefits from learning new skills and on access to both upskilling and reskilling opportunities. This section considers gender gaps in all three dimensions to contextualize the skilling decisions discussed in the previous section.

A comprehensive, cross-industry workforce survey by PwC in 2023 with close to 54,000 respondents across 46 countries and territories indicates that 74% of male respondents and 69% of female respondents believe their job requires specialized qualifications or training. As illustrated in Figure 2.22, relatively fewer women than men expect the skills required to do their job to change significantly in the next five years (54% vs 61%) and relatively fewer women than men have a clear sense of how skills required for their current role will change (62% vs 68%).

The survey further reveals that leadership, adaptability and collaboration display almost no gender gaps when it comes to the perceived importance for men’s and women’s careers (Figure 2.23a). However, given their current roles, the women surveyed judge digital, analytical and green skills as well as specialist technical or trade skills as less important over the next five years of their current career trajectories. The largest gaps in this context exist for technical and trade skills, analytical and data skills, and digital skills. Furthermore, important gender gaps exist across all skills when it comes to the confidence employees have in their employers to provide the necessary tools and opportunities to up- or reskill (Figure 2.23b).

These gender gaps in perceived usefulness of a particular skill, given current roles and perceived opportunities to acquire new skills, provide additional important context to realized skilling gaps. The survey data suggests that part of the observed skills gap can be explained by the extent to which women’s career trajectories are pointing in the direction of the skills and occupations of the future, and by the extent to which women feel they are easily able to access opportunities to acquire new skills.

While gender parity in Educational Attainment is within close grasp of the global community, it does not yet translate to equitable outcomes in the world of work. As men and women transition from schooling to the workforce, their skillsets continue to be shaped and valued differently – often to the economic disadvantage of women. It is in this space that reskilling can play a key role in valorizing all skills needed in the future of work, and therefore, in incentivizing men and women to participate without gender bias in all types of work.

Macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions play a key role in shaping current and future possibilities to achieve gender parity for countries and regions. In recent years, gender equality progress has been constrained by consecutive shocks, progressive breakdowns in social and care infrastructure, and enduring inequities aggravated by systemic transformations. As shown by this year’s index results, the scale and speed of progress are deeply insufficient to achieve gender equality by 2030.

The reticence to embrace gender parity as a condition for equitable and sustainable growth is impacting global capacity to meet current and future challenges and costing women and girls their futures. This raises a key opportunity for government and business leaders to contribute to macro level solutions for gender equality, and with it, a different kind of growth.

Resourcing gender equality efforts is crucial to avoid the rollback of hard-earned progress, and to ensure that pathways to growth, prosperity, innovation, and sustainability are levelling the ground for all persons. Through collaborative efforts and targeted interventions between governments and business, we can make 50/50 a reality.

The Forum’s Global Gender Parity Sprint 2030 is a dynamic six-year journey to accelerate global efforts towards achieving economic gender parity. With a focus on fostering economic transformation, innovation and sustainable growth, key objectives revolve around reshaping labour markets, enhancing industry-level systems and integrating gender parity into the heart of global transformations in technology, climate action and care. We invite government, business and civil society leaders to join us in this effort to reset the trendline to parity.