Work-related gender gaps persist but solutions are clear: ILO

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, according to a new International Labour Organisation (ILO) report published for International Women’s Day  tomorrow.
"We need to make it happen, and the report, 'A Quantum leap for gender equality: For a better future of work for all', provides a way forward,” said director at the ILO Conditions of Work and Equality Department Manuela Tomei.
The report is the culmination of five years of work under the ILO’s Women at Work Centenary Initiative. It finds that in the last 27 years the difference in the employment rates for men and women has shrunk by less than two percentage points. In 2018, women are still 26 percentage points less likely to be in employment than men. This contrasts with the findings of an ILO-Gallup 2017 global report on women’s and men’s preferences about women’s participation in paid work, which found that 70 per cent of women prefer to have a job rather than staying at home and that men agree.
In addition, between 2005 and 2015, the ‘motherhood employment penalty’, the difference in the proportion of adult women with children under six years in employment, compared to women without young children, increased significantly, by 38 per cent.
Moreover, women are still underrepresented at the top, a situation that has changed very little in the last 30 years. Fewer than one third of managers are women, although they are likely to be better educated than their male counterparts. The report shows generally that education is not the main reason for lower employment rates and lower pay of women, but rather that women do not receive the same dividends for education as men.
There is also a ‘motherhood leadership penalty’: only 25 per cent of managers with children under six years of age are women. Women’s share rises to 31 per cent for managers without young children.
The gender wage gap remains at an average of 20 per cent globally. Mothers experience a ‘motherhood wage penalty’ that compounds across their working life, while fathers enjoy a wage premium. 

Some 90 per cent of Nepalis still struggling or feel sense of insecurity

Some 90 per cent of Nepalis are either suffering from a sense of insecurity, or struggling, according to a report.
Though the middle class in Nepal has grown over three times – from 7 per cent to 22 per cent – in the 15 years between 1995 and 2010, it is still most vulnerable as they are mostly either suffering from a sense of insecurity or struggling, reads a World Bank study report titled 'Moving Up the Ladder', released in Kathmandu today.
"This group constitutes households with consumption levels high enough for their probability of falling into poverty to be minuscule," said senior economist at the World Bank and lead author of the report Sailesh Tiwari. But data on perceptions about current living standards as well as the outlook for the future collected by various Gallup surveys suggests that 90 per cent of Nepalis are actually either suffering or struggling, he added.
According to Gallup definitions, suffering households have well being that is at high risk and are more likely to be poor and deprived along other dimensions of welfare such as access to food, shelter and health. They are also likely to be under mental stress.
Likewise, struggling households are characterised by well being that is moderate or inconsistent. Even though they may not be directly deprived at any given point in time, they may expect to struggle to maintain that level in future.
"This implies that at least half of Nepal's nascent middle class is actually insecure about its future and thus probably constitutes what some have called the vulnerable middle class," Tiwari said.
The report also said the key challenge for Nepal in future is replicating the success in reducing poverty into building a larger and stronger middle class.
"This will require fostering an environment for the creation of more and better jobs within Nepal," the author suggested, adding that research undertaken for the report suggests Nepalis associate belonging to the middle class with being engaged in relatively secure professions such as government jobs, teaching, medicine and engineering and other forms of salaried employment. "But most of the job creation within Nepal in the last two decades has been in low skilled sectors such as construction and these jobs are mostly of casual nature."
The report has also suggested three main policy directions: equalise opportunities; reduce vulnerabilities and boost productivity; and create more and better jobs.
Tiwari suggested that ensuring all Nepali children – irrespective of the circumstances they are born into and circumstances they have no control over – have an equal shot at life chances is not just fair and equitable but also good for productivity and growth, apart from building the capacity to cope with natural disasters like  earthquakes, and finding an alternative to the remittances, which are not sustainable. The outflow of migrants has already started slowing down, it has pointed out.
Nepal urgently needs to create more and better jobs within Nepal to sustain the momentum of living standards improvement and to replicate the success in reducing poverty into commensurate success in building a larger middle class, Tiwari noted.
Though a quarter of Nepalis still live in absolute poverty, poverty in Nepal has decreased by a steady rate averaging 2.2 percentage points annually in the last two decades due to off-farm diversification at home and remittances from abroad, the report reads, attributing the drop in poverty to the labour income – accounted for 52 per cent – while remittances accounted for 27 per cent of the poverty reduction observed nationally between 1995 and 2010.
The report also noted that inter-generational social mobility has increased but with variations across social groups. "There are also important differences in the mobility experiences by the various caste/ethnicity groups that are consistent with the patterns of historical structural inequalities among social groups in Nepal," it reads.
There is a high degree of vulnerability among households and for every two Nepalis that escape poverty, one falls back below the poverty line, it is pointed out. "On an average, 45 per cent of Nepalis who are not directly poor are vulnerable to falling into poverty."