Gender equality will take 300 years to achieve, says UN chief

Pay gap for women who've never got married getting bigger: Study

Progress toward gender equality is “vanishing before our eyes”, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres told the Commission on the Status of Women on Monday.
 

Speaking to the key UN women’s rights group ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, Guterres said gender equality is “300 years away” according to the latest estimates from UN Women, the UN organisation dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women.

Guterres cited high rates of maternal mortality, girls being forced into early marriage, and girls being kidnapped and assaulted for attending school as evidence that hope of achieving gender equality “is growing more distant”. “Wo­men’s rights are being abused, threatened, and violated around the world,” Guterres said, naming a few countries in particular, including Afghanistan, where he said “women and girls have been erased from public life”.

Meanwhile, never-married women are the fastest growing cohort in the labour market. Yet, as their ranks have swelled their wage gap has, too.

The group’s median weekly earnings are 92.1 per cent of what men who have never married make, a new report from Wells Fargo released on Wednesday found. That gap has increased from a decade ago, when they brought in 95.8 per cent of what men did.
 

Overall, women make around 83 per cent of what men do in the US, according to the Census Bureau. But given that the motherhood penalty accounts for such a large part of the pay gap, Wells Fargo economist Sarah House was surprised by the growing wage gap among single women.

IMF chief on women struggle International Monetary Fund Mana­ging Director Kristalina Georgieva told CNBC that she has always worked “twice as hard” to be equal to her male colleagues.
 

“I don’t want my daughter and my granddaughter to have to work harder than men to be equal,” she told CNBC.