The world has made great strides in tackling many of the toughest challenges women and girls face worldwide: More girls are going to school than ever before, maternal mortality has plummeted in recent decades, and discriminatory laws are increasingly being taken off the books. But last year, the economic gap between men and women got wider for the first time in a decade.
The principle of equal pay has been enshrined by the International Labour Organization for more than 60 years, yet today, women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. That’s a global average – in many countries, women are doing far worse than that.
Why is economic equality so far off? In a world where women do two and a half times more unpaid domestic and care work than men, where 42 percent of women don’t have a bank account, and where 155 different countries have at least one law in place that restricts women’s economic opportunity, it’s perhaps not surprising that the fight is not yet over.
The World Economic Forum has estimated that it will take 217 years to close the economic gender gap based on our current rate of progress. Today, News Deeply is launching a new platform – Women’s Advancement Deeply – for all those who think that 217 years is too long to wait.
Women’s Advancement Deeply will take on the big questions about why the economic gender gap persists – from access to land rights to access to mobile phones, credit and loans; from discrimination in the workplace to the battle to get employed in the first place; from the burden of unpaid care work to the campaign to raise wages in the paid care industry.
We’ll provide a hub where those working to advance women’s rights can come together to understand the latest research in the field, share solutions that are working on the ground and learn how using a gender lens can help governments and investors make better decisions about how to spend their money.
We’ll combine specialist on-the-ground reporting with insights from our community of experts to help our readers understand what is, and what isn’t, working to make women’s economic advancement a reality.
Women’s Advancement Deeply is brought to you by the team from Women & Girls, News Deeply’s first platform dedicated to gender equality in the developing world. At Women’s Advancement Deeply, we’ll continue to focus on developing countries, where women often face greater barriers to equality due to poorer overall economic conditions, and sometimes have to strive for independence in the face of conflict and crisis.
We hope Women’s Advancement Deeply will be the first of a number of News Deeply platforms to dive deep into the issues that affect women and girls worldwide. Please get in touch if you’d like to help us shape future initiatives.
In the meantime, we encourage you to enjoy the independent, in-depth reporting and expert analysis on Women’s Advancement Deeply. We look forward to having you join us in our coverage of women’s economic issues, and we welcome your feedback.