Whether gender equality possible in the near future
It’s my observation that women’s job opportunities have barely improved globally since the early 1990s. The female workers are still penalised for having children and looking after them. I’ve gone through the recent report of International Labour Organisation (ILO) where it showed that 1.3 billion women were in work in 2018, compared with two billion men – a less than two percent improvement in the last 27 years.
Anyone can easily understand the real scenario of gender equality when ILO said a future of work in which women will no longer lag behind men is within reach, but it will take a quantum leap, not just hesitant incremental steps, to get there.
In fact, women are still 26 percentage points less likely to be in employment than men. Even on women’s and men’s preferences about women’s participation in paid work, about 70 percent of women prefer to have a job rather than staying at home and that men agree. I hope, this situation will change in near future. The women around the globe will come forward to achieve the gender equality everywhere.
Shelly Rahman
Brisbane, Australia
