• Even though significant gains have been made globally, gender inequality continues to hold women and girls back and deprives them of basic rights and opportunities professionally.
• According to UN Women: the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, globally women earn 23% less than men for work of equal value.
• As a result of this inequality, there’s a lifetime of income inequality between men and women, and more women are retiring into poverty, thereby defeating the global target of ending poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Ghana joins the rest of the world to celebrate International Women’s Day today, March 8, 2020.
The day is marked globally on March 8 every year to celebrate women’s achievements from political, economic and socio-cultural space.
The theme for this year’s celebration is, I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights.
It is aligned with UN Women’s new multigenerational campaign, Generation Equality, which marks the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platforms for Action.
Adopted in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, the Beijing Platform for Action is recognized as the most progressive roadmap for the empowerment of women and girls, everywhere.
The first International Women’s Day occurred in 1911 and was supported by over one million people.
2020 is a pivotal year for advancing gender equality worldwide, as the global community takes stock of progress made for women’s rights since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action.
Even though significant gains have been made globally, gender inequality continues to hold women and girls back and deprives them of basic rights and opportunities professionally.
According to UN Women: the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, globally women earn 23% less than men for work of equal value.
As a result of this inequality, there’s a lifetime of income inequality between men and women, and more women are retiring into poverty, thereby defeating the global target of ending poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Gender Gap index
In 2018, though Ghana ranked 25 when it came to economic participation and opportunities for women, it is ranked 117 out of 149 countries when it comes to political empowerment of women.
The 2020 Global Gender Gap Index by World Economic Forum showed that gender parity at the global level stands at 68.6% and the bottom 10 countries have closed just 40% of the gender gap.
In terms of parliamentary representation, globally women have secured just 25% of available positions, a figure that slips to 21% at a ministerial level. At this level, there are nine where they have no representation.
In the past 50 years, 85 states have had no female head of state.
In terms of economic participation, the gender gap will take 257 years to close (compared to 202 years in the 2019 report).
By region, Western Europe has made the most progress on gender parity (standing at 76.7%), followed by North America (72.9%), Latin America and the Caribbean (72.2%), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (71.3%), Sub-Saharan Africa (68.2%), South Asia (66.1%) and the Middle East and North Africa (60.5%).
Credit to Source: Citi News Room
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