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Women’s progress in the workplace is set to reverse due to the coronavirus pandemic, professional services firm PwC found in its analysis of developed countries.
PwC said that the pandemic was set to push the progress towards gender equality in the workplace back to 2017 levels, in a report published Tuesday, ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8.
This was according to PwC’s analysis of women’s economic empowerment, across 33 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for its annual Women in Work index. The index measures women’s participation in the labor market and equality according to a weighted average in five categories.
PwC applied OECD forecasts of the unemployment rate and labor force size for 2019, which was latest data available, to its Women in Work index results in order to gauge the potential impact on these countries in 2020-22. It found that the gender equality index is expected to fall 2 points between 2019 and 2021, below the overall average score of 62 points in 2017.
In order to undo the pandemic’s damage to women’s position in the workplace by 2030, PwC projected that progress towards gender equality needed to be twice as fast as it was in the previous decade.
Laura Hinton, chief people officer at PwC, said that these findings showed there was “absolutely no time to lose in addressing the very real impact of the pandemic on women.”
Gender equality affects economic growth
Research has shown that women in the global workforce have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, in being more likely to work in the sectors hardest-hit by the crisis. A United Nations study also found that women have been taking on the brunt of extra childcare and domestic duties since the onset of the pandemic.
Hinton said that governments and business both had parts to play in “addressing the gender inequalities in unpaid work, through promoting and championing schemes like shared parental leave, affordable childcare and flexible working arrangements.”
Larice Stielow, senior economist at PwC, pointed out that losing women from the workforce “not only reverses progress towards gender equality, it also affects economic growth.”
In its ranking of the 33 countries analyzed in the report, based on the 2019 data, PwC found Iceland and Sweden retained their place as the top performing countries for women’s progress in the workplace. New Zealand moved into third place, thanks to progress in closing its gender pay gap and an increase in the number of its full-time female employees.
In fact, PwC’s analysis showed that boosting women’s employment within the OECD — which spans 37 developed economies — to match the rate in Sweden would increase gross domestic product by $6 trillion a year across this group of countries. Closing the gender pay gap would add $2 trillion to the OECD’s GDP each year.
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