The impact of the covid-19 crisis on the gender gap

The World Economic Forum has published the 15th edition of the “Global Report on the Gender Gap”. This study prepared after a year of covid-19, warns that the economic crisis and the health emergency have had a more severe impact on women than on men, which has set back some achievements of gender parity achieved before the pandemic, mainly in the areas of the labor market and domestic work.

The report shows the results of the “Global Gender Gap Index 2021” that analyzes gender parity in four areas or sub-indices (Economy, Education, Health and political participation), through 14 indicators in 156 countries. Among the main conclusions of the report would be the following:

• Iceland remains the most gender-equal country in the world, followed by Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Sweden.
• Women have been more impacted by the covid-19 crisis from an economic and labor point of view. The pandemic has hit the consumer and retail sectors hardest in most countries, sectors in which there is a greater representation of women than men. For this reason, the loss of jobs in women (5%) would have been higher than that of men (3.9%). In addition, since the beginning of the pandemic, women have had to a greater extent a "double shift" of paid and unpaid work (accentuated by the closure of schools and other services).
• Gender gaps in both labour participation and income are likely to increase after the covid-19 crisis: Although the proportion of women among skilled professionals continues to increase, they would be underrepresented in the jobs of the future (for example, in cloud computing, women would occupy 14% of jobs.; 20% of engineering jobs; and 32% in Artificial Intelligence and Big data). In addition, women will continue to suffer unjustified salary differences and their presence in management positions has stagnated in the last year, according to recruitment data from LinkedIn, compared to the growing trend of the last 2 years.
• The gender gap in the political area remains the largest of the four gaps tracked in the report. The pandemic has also represented a setback in this area, mainly due to countries with a larger population, placing women with only 26.1% of all parliamentary positions and 22.6% of ministries worldwide.