The year 2022 is filled with multilayered crises, including inflation, the ongoing pandemic, the climate catastrophe, and the large-scale conflict of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Besides all these, there’s a halt in progress towards gender parity. Amid all these, global leaders are tackling economic & political shock, which is intensifying.
The economic downturn and social impact because of the pandemic and geopolitical conflict have ceased progress and worsened outcomes for women and girls all over the world – and risk creating uncertainty & scarring in the labour market. This halt in progress toward gender parity is bringing catastrophe for the future of our economies, and the side effect is resulting in more discrimination towards women in terms of economic, political, and social equality.
Take the issue of female representation in several fields like Education, Healthcare, Business, Politics, Economic participation, etc. Women’s jobs were 1.8 times more vulnerable than men’s throughout the pandemic and suffered more disruption in the subsequent economic fallout. In other words, gender parity has been set back by an entire future generation, and women today are bearing the brunt of the current economic downturn.
Global Gender Gap Report covers the evolution of gender-based gaps in four areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational perspective; health and survival; and political empowerment. When examining female representation in leadership positions, the Gender Gap Report finds that only 19% and 16% of leadership roles in manufacturing and infrastructure, respectively, are occupied by women. However, in sectors like non-governmental organizations and education, women hold over 40% of leadership roles. While there has been progress, among Fortune 500 companies, only 8.8% of the CEOs are women.
In Bangladesh (71st), women this year experienced a decline in overall gender parity, as reflected in a lower gender gap score and index ranking compared to 2021. The change is in part the product of slightly lower country performance on Educational Attainment (-0.028 decrease in score). A slight drop in the gender gap score for literacy and the absence of recent data in primary education overshadow a slim increase in gender parity in tertiary education (+0.065 score change). Bangladesh reported no changes in Political Empowerment (9th) and Health and Survival (129th) indexes. On the Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex (141st), there was a reduction in both men’s and women’s workforce participation by 3.6 and 5.45 percentage points, respectively. However, the proportional impact was higher for women. The negative impact of this shortfall was nonetheless counteracted by a 5.3 percentage point increase in the share of women who are professional and technical workers, as well a 13% increase in women’s estimated earned income (compared to men’s 11% increase), which raised parity outcomes overall.
It is important to recognize inclusive design, which focuses on collaboration resulting in greater access to the economy, culture, or technology while equality makes economic sense; governments should measure it and budgets promote it.
Accelerating gender parity by taking forward the inclusive growth Strategy
Gender parity is necessary to recover from our current economic crisis and for a sustainable future. When human capital is diverse, companies can be more creative and productive— diversity is essential for economies today to rebuild and restructure. When more women are in the workforce, economic prosperity will likely lead to more inclusive and sustainable growth. Closing the gender gap and making up for the economic downturn is thus critical for a faster, more robust recovery. Improving around the edges of our existing economic system isn’t enough to address the gender issue. Only a robust and bold re-imagining of our economy will help us resolve the challenges we face.
Hence, these strategies need to be considered to build faster and more robust inclusive economic growth.
- Inclusive wealth
‘Wealth creation’ is a critical and problematic term. It has come to represent the pitfalls of an unequal, financialized, and extractive economy, where local economic activity serves distant companies and decision-makers, undermining the resilience and inclusiveness of local economies. The distribution of wealth in many countries is extremely unequal. Making wealth as well as income more inclusive is therefore critical. Inclusive wealth varies in two key aspects. The first is financial: Distributing jobs and wealth inclusively through broadening the ownership of wealth and assets. The other one is community or place-based wealth: where local people generate economic value, and that wealth remains within a town or city. Economic Gardening (EG) and Community Wealth Building enlighten the possibilities of looking at wealth creation on an entirely different level, altogether more progressive & lighter. By focusing on building from within rather than becoming like big companies or development projects, they articulate how long-term local wealth creation can make more inclusive and sustainable economies.
- Inclusive livelihoods
The persistent inequality, ongoing pandemic, and war have been stalling productivity and living standards, causing inflation, declining job quality, and a sharp rise in in-work poverty have become major challenges. The inclusive livelihood strategy considers efforts to tackle these challenges by confronting inequalities in income, job, and opportunity, principally through innovative social policies, more inclusion of women in the workforce, skills and labour market programs that connect people to good quality jobs and provide economic security and support upwards dynamism. Our policymakers and practitioners should consider their interest in these key areas to build inclusive growth.
- Making tech more inclusive
Thirdly, we need to prepare better for the future and ensure that more women are entering the industries and workforce of the future to design our future economies. If we want our technology-driven economies to represent everybody, then we must ensure that more women are going into artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data, biotechnology, and more, becoming a core part of how we design these systems for the future. Upstream efforts by businesses reaching back into high schools and colleges are critical for tackling the gender gap.
- Inclusive futures
To build an inclusive economy is to create a long-term planning and decision-making, so that short-term actions do not come as a tradeoff for our future generations. The challenge of adapting our economic strategies to the imperatives of responding to climate change and growing gender parity issues is more urgent than ever. Surprisingly, at the city or regional scale, environmental action and inclusive economic development have come together to anticipate and respond to future challenges that expose the interdependencies between social, economic, and environmental challenges—building new tools that can be used to manage public assets better to unlock long-term investment in social and economic infrastructure. It shows what value can be added to our future to develop sustainable and more inclusive approaches.
- Sustainability
Economic and social wealth is the social worth of the entire set of assets that contribute to human well-being, including human-produced (manufactured, financial, human, social) and natural capital. In the case of natural capital, human use must preserve or restore nature’s ability to produce the ecosystem of goods and services that contribute to human well-being. Decision-making must thus incorporate the long-term costs and benefits, and not merely the short-term gains, of human use of our full asset base.
Inclusive and equal gender participation remains a critical driver of national prosperity. Countries that invest in all their human capital and make it easier for their populations to balance work and family life tend to be more prosperous. With an increasingly uncertain economic outlook, unleashing the creativity and dynamism of a country’s entire human capital is critical to overcoming the current crises and accelerating recovery.
Embedding resilience and inclusion is key to putting the global economy on a more sustainable footing. To grow our way out of this crisis, fresh energy, ideas, and leadership are also critical.
Author- Jannatul Ferdousy
