Vancouver, Canada
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Thousands of world leaders, policymakers, experts and activists convene this week at the Women Deliver conference in Canada to look at women’s economic rights, pay gaps, education opportunities and other wide-ranging issues of gender equality.
Here are 10 facts illustrating where women stand today:
Phunchok Angmo, 33, a mathematics teacher, poses for a photograph at Thiksey monastery, near Leh, the largest town in the region of Ladakh, nestled high in the Indian Himalayas, India, on 28th September, 2016. PICTURE: Reuters/Cathal McNaughton
1. Around the world women earn about half as much as men, said the World Economic Forum which reported an income gap between men and women of nearly 51 per cent in 2018. At the current rate of progress, it will take 108 years for the global gender gap to close and 202 years until economic gender parity.
2. According to Fortune‘s list of the 500 highest-grossing US companies, fewer than seven per cent have female chief executive officers. But that is a new high, up from under five per cent a year ago.
3. Only 17 heads of state in 2018 were women, according to the World Economic Forum. Women held 18 per cent of the world’s ministerial positions and 24 per cent of its parliamentary roles.
4. Globally one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence, usually by an intimate partner, according to UN Women. One in two women killed worldwide is killed by a partner or family member. That compares to one in 20 of men killed.
5. Some 87,000 women were victims of femicide – defined as the intentional murder of women because they are women – in 2017, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. More than half were killed by intimate partners or family members. Women are at the greatest risk in Africa and at least risk in Europe of being killed by a family member or partner.
6. In the European Union, 45 to 55 per cent of women experienced sexual harassment since age 15, according to a survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.
7. Seven in 10 trafficking victims worldwide are women and girls, and more than three out of four of them are trafficked for sexual exploitation, according to the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime.
8. At least 200 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation in 30 countries where data is available, according to UNICEF, the UN’s children’s agency. UNICEF said the practice is “almost universal” in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, where levels among girls and women are higher than 90 per cent.
9. According to the World Bank, child marriage is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, where 3.4 million girls marry as children each year. Globally, the number of girls marrying as children peaked at about 13 million around 2005 and declined to fewer than 11 million in 2017.
10. Women have the same access to financial services as men in 60 per cent of the world’s countries and the same access to land ownership in 42 percent of countries, according to the World Economic Forum.
