Can the world be fair to women?

It has been 120 years since the first country in the world, New Zealand, gave women the right to vote. But a report on gender equality by the World Economic Forum says it will take another 80 years before the global gender gap is closed.

The report looks at how well women are doing around the world in four areas: politics, economics, health and education.

It found that women currently have 60 percent of the standing men have worldwide, a figure that has improved by only four percentage points since 2006.

It turns out that Nordic countries are the best place to be a woman, with Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark leading the world’s five most equal nations.

And at the other end of the scale, Yemen, Pakistan, Chad, Syria and Mali are the most unequal societies in the world.

Well as it stands, there is not a country in the world where women with similar qualifications are paid as much as men for doing the same job.

Some industries are better at gender equality than others. In the business world, there are only 26 female CEOs on the list of Fortune 500 companies. That is just 5.2 percent

In politics, it is better but not by much. On average, only 21.8 percent of national parliamentarians are women. And here is an interesting one: Between 1992 and 2011 fewer than 10 percent of peace negotiators were female.

Presenter: David Foster

Guests:

Arni Hole – Director General of Norway’s General Ministry of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion.

Rebecca Tavares – Representative of UN Women’s Multicountry Office for India.

Tina Karkera – Lawyer and mother from the US state of New Jersey.