THE world bank has showed in a report how global wealth could rise by $160 trillion if women could have the same lifetime earnings as men.
According to the report, many laws and regulations continue to prevent women from entering the workforce or starting a business.
The UNDP Nigeria, showed facts and figures that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar that men get for the same work and women represent just 13 percent of agricultural landholders.
Numbers from the UNDP also showed that almost 750 million women and girls alive today were married before their 18th birthday.
Only 24 percent of national parliamentarians were women as of November 2018, a small increase from 11.3 percent in 1995.
Discrimination can have lasting effects on women’s economic inclusion and labor force participation, the world bank report highlighted.
The world bank report also showed that in poorer countries, women globally are 7.5 percent less likely to have an account with a financial institution or mobile banking than men.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates a $1.5 trillion annual credit deficit for women-owned small and medium enterprises.
Gender-based violence the most extreme constraint on women’s voice and agency remains a global epidemic affecting more than one in three women over the course of a lifetime, the report showed.
Analysis by the bank showed that globally, women’s labor force participation fell from 51 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2018.
Women devote one to five hours more a day to unpaid domestic work and childcare and other family care work, and one to six hours a day less to market activities than men.
The World Bank also gave different strategies on how companies and countries can focus investments to ensure equal economic participation by both genders.
The bank suggested that gender gaps should be closed in education and health in countries where they persist, including girls’ completion of secondary schooling, boys’ drop-out in secondary, and improving the quality of learning for both girls and boys.
Also showed how removal of constraints to more and better jobs for women, focusing on safe transport to and from work, child and other family care, training in the digital and technological skills required to compete for jobs would be helpful.
Access economic opportunities, and reducing occupational sex segregation is key according to the world bank.
The world bank also highlighted the removal of barriers to women’s ownership and control of land, housing and bank accounts, and improve access to finance, technology and insurance services needed to make such assets productive.