Women Will Finally Get Equal Pay — In 170 Years
(Photo: Getty Images)
Good news, ladies: A new study has predicted when women will finally earn as much money as men. The bad news? We’ll all be dead - because it won’t be for another 170 years.
On Tuesday, the World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gap Report, an annual study that seeks to quantify and track gender inequality across 144 countries, specifically focusing on health, education, economy, and politics. But despite improvements in "health outcomes" and "educational attainment," overall, things are looking pretty dismal. In 2015, the WEF predicted that we should achieve pay equality between men and women in 118 years. In the 2016 report, that estimate jumped 53 years. For those counting at home, this means we won’t achieve pay equality until 2186.
As USA Today points out, "highly industrialized nations" are just as much to blame for the gender disparity as developing countries. Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, Ireland, The Philippines, Slovena, New Zealand, and Nicaragua took the top ten spots for gender equality; while the United States barely cracked the top 50 and came in at 45th. (Last year, the U.S. ranked 26th.)
Year-over-year, a majority of the countries included in the study have also seen their "gender gap score" go down, which suggests things are getting worse rather than better.
"It is our hope that this latest edition of the Report will serve as a call to action to governments to accelerate gender equality through bolder policymaking, to businesses to prioritize gender equality as a critical talent and moral imperative and to all of us to become deeply conscious of the choices we make every day that impact gender equality globally," the study’s authors wrote in the preface. "We call upon every reader of this Report to join these efforts."
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