COVID-19 isn’t just creating financial hardship and increasing unemployment levels for women in the workforce. A new report from PwC (a Fair360, formerly DiversityInc Hall of Fame company) has revealed that the pandemic is also pushing progress towards gender equality in the workplace back by years — to 2017 levels according to the group’s estimates.
The PwC report analyzed women’s economic empowerment across 33 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s annual Women in Work index. The index measures women’s participation in the labor market and equality according to a weighted average in five categories.
CNBC’s Vicky McKeever reported that “PwC applied OECD forecasts of the unemployment rate and labor force size for 2019, which was latest data available, to its Women in Work index results in order to gauge the potential impact on these countries in 2020-22. It found that the gender equality index is expected to fall 2 points between 2019 and 2021, below the overall average score of 62 points in 2017.”
