The World Economic Forum predicts it will now take 135.6 years to reach gender equality — as the pandemic set the world back by a generation, delaying parity by about 36 years.
Saadia Zahidi, a managing director at the World Economic Forum, told CNBC that “100 years to global gender parity was already not good enough — and now (it is) 136 years globally.” “The pandemic has had a massive impact, and essentially rolled back a lot of the progress that was made in the past,” she told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Wednesday.
One reason why the gender gap has widened is that sectors hit hard by Covid-19 mostly employed women. “Whether that’s travel and tourism that’s shut down globally, or (the) consumer and retail sector that has been impacted in so many countries, these are large employers of women,” Zahidi said. -CNBC