WEF: overall gender gap narrows but widens in workplace
CGTN's Global Business

Gender inequality is narrowing overall but widening in the workplace, according to a recent report by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The organization tracks gender disparities in 153 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.

World Economic Forum Managing Director Saadia Zahidi said women's workplace inequality is caused not only by traditional job discrimination in some countries but also technological disruption globally.

"There are definitely some parts of the world where it laws that forbid women going into certain profession where either culturally or legally acceptable and others are not. The other end of things what will happen to these professions globally and developed and developing countries alike," Zahidi explained.

The overall gender gap stands at 69 percent, according to the report. The score is higher than last year's report but still 31 percent points away from 100 percent parity. Health and education are two areas where the gender gap is almost closed.

The Health and Survival sub index stands at 97 percent, three percent away from complete parity. The Education Attainment sub index is measured at 96 percent.

"As the fourth revolution starts transforming labor market that were we starting to see some emerging evidence that not only are certain role in the past have brought a lot of women into the work force, not only those have been disrupted but in addition to that, the new emerging roles, for example cloud computing, engineering or artificial intelligence- related roles. These are that, one, tend to have smaller pipeline women going into them and, second, tend to have much more discrimination by it when comes to the world place, so those aspects have to transform if we do not want a further widening of economic gender gap," Zahidi said.

Differences in politics and economic opportunity remain significantly large. There is still 75 percent points of gap to be closed in political empowerment despite an improvement over last year's figure.

And the gap widens in economic participation and opportunity to 42 percent on last year's base. The report said it would take 257 years to close the gap in workplace while the time was shorter at 202 years in last year's report.