Gender Pay Equality is Still 120 Years Away

Women and men around the world are closer to gender parity than at any point in the past two decades, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Gender Gap Report, which measures disparities in economic participation, education, health and political empowerment. Still, at the current pace, it will take an estimated 120 years to close the gap completely, according to the new analysis.

Among the 97 economies tracked consistently since 2006, the report found  that 69.4% of the gender gap has now been closed — the highest level of parity recorded. That represents an improvement of 5.2 percentage points over the past 20 years, from 64.2% in 2006.

While no country has achieved full parity across the four measures, some are doing better than others. Iceland ranked first for the 17th consecutive year, having closed 93% of its gender gap. According to the WEF, it remains the only economy to have passed the 90% threshold. Finland ranked second at 87.2%, followed by Norway at 85.7%. Namibia, at 84.5%, placed fourth and was the highest-ranked Sub-Saharan African economy. The U.K. came fifth at 84.2%. New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Germany and Ireland completed the top 10, with Australia entering the top ten for the first time. The U.S. came 47th.

But progress has varied sharply depending on the area measured.

Across the 143 economies measured in 2025 and 2026, education and health are now closest to parity, with  the educational attainment gap 96.9% closed and the health and survival gap 96.2% closed.

When it comes to the economy and politics, much larger disparities remain. Women have closed 61.7% of the gap in economic participation and opportunity, while the political empowerment score stands at just 22.1%. Political empowerment has nevertheless recorded the largest improvement of the four dimensions over the report’s 20-year history among the 97 economies tracked consistently since 2006.

Political representation, on the other hand, is one area where recent progress has gone into reverse, its parity score falling by 0.4 percentage points over the past year to the lowest it has been since 2016.

Another reversal: Of the 97 consistently tracked economies, the proportion of those led by a woman peaked at 27% in 2022 but has since fallen back to 2016 levels, according to the report.

Women also remain substantially underrepresented in some of the most influential positions in business,  accounting for only 19.1% of chief executive roles, according to the WEF. This is despite women making greater inroads into senior leadership over the past two decades.

The report also points to a new potential source of inequality: artificial intelligence. Women account for fewer than one in five AI engineers and remain underrepresented at every level of AI companies, raising concerns that the technological transformation of the labour market could reinforce existing disparities.

Commenting on the analysis, Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the World Economic Forum and co-founder of the Global Gender Pay Gap Report, wrote that over the past twenty years, progress toward parity has been “driven by policy reforms and workplace improvements, advocacy and civil society action, shifts in investment and capital allocation, and the daily efforts of countless women and men around the world.” 

Yet progress has been “neither automatic nor fast enough,” she conceded, writing: “Over these two decades, the world has experienced a global financial crisis, rapid digital transformation, major cultural and political shifts, a pandemic and unprecedented geopolitical volatility. These forces have tested the resilience of progress and, in some cases, reversed it,” she wrote.

There remain reasons for optimism, however. Nearly every economy tracked since 2006 improved its gender parity score, with Namibia, Iceland, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, France, Bolivia, Chile and Nepal recording some of the largest improvements, each narrowing its gender gap by more than 12 percentage points.

In the past year, progress has also continued. Among the 143 economies appearing in both the 2025 and 2026 reports, the overall parity score increased by 0.4 percentage points, from 68.8% to 69.2%. Approximately two-thirds of those economies improved their individual scores, although 36% recorded a deterioration.

And yet, at the pace of progress observed over the past two decades, the WEF estimates that closing the remaining global gender gap will take another 120 years.