NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A report from the World Bank depicts a global work landscape in which women, despite some advances, still consistently earn less than men, women’s participation in the workforce has stagnated at about 56 percent over the last two decades, women lag behind men in nearly every economic measure and no country has reached gender wage parity.
Here are some of the key findings from“Gender at Work: A companion report to the World Development Report on Jobs,”released on Thursday:
--Globally women, especially poor women, trail men in terms of access to information and communication technology. In 2012, 200 million fewer girls and women than boys and men were online in developing countries—a gap of 23 percent.
--Women are 21 percent less likely than men to own or have access to a mobile phone in developing countries.
--On average, working women earn between 10 percent and 30 percent less than working men.
--Women are only half as likely as men to have full-time wage jobs for an employer.
-- Colombia, Fiji, Jamaica, Lesotho and the Philippines are the only countries in which women reached or surpassed gender parity with men in such occupations as legislators, senior officials and managers.
--Across developing countries, the proportion of men with a formal bank account was nine percentage points larger than that of women.
--Worldwide, 47 percent of women have opened an account at a formal financial institution compared with 55 percent of men.
--Women’s earnings often decline when they have children, a situation experienced by 71 percent of women under the age of 30 and 88 percent of women aged 30 to 39. But men of all ages with children are likely to have higher earnings than men without children, which is not the case for women in any age group.
--Female-owned businesses are generally smaller and employ fewer people than those owned by men.
--Women represent an estimated 83 percent of domestic workers worldwide.
--Women do most of the world’s unpaid work, both in the home and in family-owned businesses, where about one in every four women work for no pay and no formal share in the business.
--Four in 10 people globally, and nearly half those in developing countries, agree that, when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to them than women.
--Source: Gender at Work report, The World Bank, 2014
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