Technology will widen pay gap and hit women hardest - Davos report

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 5:12 PM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Technology will widen pay gap and hit women hardest
- Davos report
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Technology will widen pay gap and hit women hardest – Davos report
Research into jobs finds men’s dominance in IT and biotech is reversing
trend towards equality
By Jane Martinson
Jan 21 2018
<
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/21/technology-widen-pay-gap-hit-womens-jobs-hardest-davos-report
>

The gulf between men and women at work – in both pay and status – is likely
to widen unless action is taken to tackle inequality in high-growth sectors
such as technology, say researchers at this week’s World Economic Forum
summit in Davos.

A new WEF report on the future of jobs finds the dominance of men in
industries such as information and biotechnology, coupled with the enduring
failure of women to rise to the top even in the health and education
sectors, is helping to reverse gender equality after years of improvements.

The report estimates that 57% of the jobs set to be displaced by technology
between now and 2026 belong to women. According to Saadia Zahidi, the WEF’s
head of education, gender and work, this underlines that global efforts to
reduce gender inequality in business are stalling.

“We’re really looking at a worsening of inequality, particularly in IT but
across all sectors,” Zahidi said. “We are losing valuable opportunity to
reduce gender inequality.”

The warning comes at a historic moment in the 47-year history of Davos: for
the first time, the annual gathering of the world’s political and financial
leaders in the Swiss mountain resort will have all-female co-chairs, in an
attempt to increase awareness of longstanding gender and other inequalities
in business and wider society.

The seven women chosen to lead the meeting come from all sectors of
society: from the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine
Lagarde, to Chetna Sinha, an Indian social entrepreneur focused on
micro-finance for female entrepreneurs.

Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union
Confederation and another of the seven co-chairs, said the fact that no men
have been appointed to any of the meeting’s strategic roles this year
“sends a strong signal that all is not right with the world”.

Burrow, an Australian union leader who described herself in her acceptance
speech in 2010 as a “warrior for women”, said recent events had made it
even more important to speak up for gender equality in the workplace and
society at large. “We saw a wave of misogyny unleashed last year and it’s
been allowed to escalate by government and corporations,” she told the
Guardian.

The US president Donald Trump, who is expected to attend Davos this week,
was “partly responsible for unleashing” this wave, she added.

Despite introducing a quota in 2011 designed to increase the number of
female delegates attending, men continue to dominate Davos. Just 21% of
some 3,000 delegates are women.

The WEF’s annual gender gap report at the end of last year calculated that
the gulf between male and female opportunity had widened for first time
since it started gathering data in 2006. “The global economic model has
failed working people and failed women more than most,” Burrow said. “In
the world of work, using any set of indicators, progress for women has
stagnated. This has been driven by corporate greed and profit, more than
anything.”

Chetna Sinha, the founder and chair of the Mann Deshi Foundation, believes
that the all-female panel will bring gender inequality into “the heart of
the corporate/business world, and that’s a really useful thing”.

She is particularly keen to ensure that “voices of poor women” are heard,
adding that the panel emphasises the diversity of experience at Davos, with
non-governmental and grassroots organisations joining the political and
business leaders. “At Davos, I see myself representing the fractured
world,” she said.

[snip]

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