Global Pay Parity Is a Century Away and U.S. Ranking Plunges in New Gender Pay Gap Report
Key takeaways
- Global gender pay gap report shows it will take over 130 years to reach pay parity
- U.S. has slipped from 27th to 43rd in the rankings
- Investors can focus on supporting women-led businesses, the femtech industry and ESG investing to help speed up closing the gap
The World Economic Forum (WEC) has released its annual Global Gender Pay Gap report — and it was a mixed bag of results. The silver lining is that the global pay gap has retreated slightly from the pandemic peak, but we’re still hundreds of years behind and the U.S. has some work to do. Let’s get into it.
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What did the report say?
The WEC’s latest gender pay gap report found that while the gender pay gap is closing, we’re still 131 years behind as we lost a generation of progress from the pandemic. Yikes.
The report found it was the usual suspects of insufficient care networks, new technologies impacting roles in the workforce and general economic stagnation that put women behind on salaries. Women also faced a slightly higher global unemployment rate, sitting at 4.5% compared to 4.3% for men.
Iceland again topped the rankings, closing over 90% of its gender pay gap. The U.S. fell to 43rd in the rankings, a steep drop from its 27th place last year. The reason for the plunge was due to the widening gap between men and women with political empowerment.
How investors can help close the pay gap
131 years for global pay equity is a long time to wait. For investors looking to speed up that process, there are options available. ESG investing isn’t just about the environment — it also focuses on socially responsible governance. There are plenty of popular ESG exchange-traded funds (ETFs), such as the iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF which has seen a 14.48% return this year.
Another avenue is the blossoming femtech industry, with some predicting it will become a trillion-dollar industry in the next decade. Looking for femtech-specific stocks or larger companies investing in these industries can help to close the gender pay gap.
And finally, investing in women-led companies, as long as it works for your investing strategy,
While 87% of 2021’s Fortune 500 companies that had female CEOs had above-average profits, women received a measly 2.1% of all VC funding in the U.S. for the first quarter of 2023.
The bottom line
The gender pay gap, having widened once more during the pandemic, is slowly coming back down — but the U.S. has slipped some ways down the rankings. Luckily, you can make some quick tweaks to your portfolio that can help you shorten that timescale — and using AI to help you do it makes the whole process even easier.
One of the ways to support women-led start-ups is by investing in the tech market. Q.ai’s Emerging Tech Kit uses AI to sift through the masses of data to predict the best-performing tech stocks and ETFs; it then dynamically adjusts the Kit’s holdings to help you grow your returns.
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