According to data from the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap, women work 50 more minutes a day than men on average and 39 more days a year.
The WEF adds that the current economic gap is the largest it’s ever been since the crash of 2008 and that the current inequalities could take up to 170 years to close. They add that there is a heavy burden on women in the form of unpaid work. This is in the form of housework, child care and older people care. When factored in altogether, women work more than a month more than men a year.
The report says that almost a quarter of a billion women entered the global workforce in the last 10 years.
India, Portugal and Estonia had the highest rates of work inequality, with Germany and Sweden having the most equal. In the UK, women work 12 days more than men. Japan and the Netherlands have a reversal of the norm with men working more days than women on average.
It could be argued the current job market only exacerbates this problem. As more and more graduates are produced from universities but the older generation are retiring later and later, on top of the rate of business and economic growth plunging, more and more young people are being forced to work for free just in order to get experience in their related fields. This only adds to the amount of unpaid work both men and women are forced to tolerate.
