This year in Davos, Switzerland, 400 of the world’s most powerful and influential women will gather for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting. Co-chaired by Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Judith Rodin and including Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, South Korea’s President Park Guen-hye, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg among participants, the impressive list goes on. But our annual report is labelled the “Gender Gap” for a reason. The world is far from gender parity when it comes to getting women into leadership positions in any area of life, whether we are talking about government, business, civil society or the media. Fewer than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In the world’s biggest economies, just over double that percentage hold boardroom positions. The world’s political leadership is only marginally more representative, with 17% of ministerial positions held by women. Just 11% of heads of government or state are women. Reliable global data is hard to come by in other sectors, but US data shows that in the media fewer than 10% of the top managers in newspapers are female. Of the largest NGOs, 12% are woman-led. In education, an outlier, a quarter of university and college presidents are female.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 02:17:31 +0000