Gender gaps persist across industries and leadership roles, report reveals
Women's workforce participation has gone up at both workforce and leadership levels in the past decade, but gender gaps continue to persist across industries and workplace hierarchy, according to a new report.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released on Wednesday its Global Gender Gap Report 2025, revealing that economic and political advances closed the global gender gap to 68.8%, with full parity an estimated 123 years away.
Looking at the labour market, the 19th edition of the WEF report found that women represented 41.2% of the overall workforce as of 2024, up from 39.3% in 2015.
The share of women in top-level management roles also reached 28.8%, up from 26.2% in 2015. Women in mid-management roles also increased from 31.5% to 33.4%.
While these are important gains, the report warned that momentum has slowed.
"Since 2020, the gap between women in mid-level and top-level leadership has stalled at 5.4 percentage points, indicating persistent drains in the leadership pipeline," it read.
The share of women among new hires to top-level management positions also fell slightly post-pandemic after a steady increase from 34.8% in 2022.
"This contraction comes at a time when the shortage of skilled workers is becoming more severe, just as economic resilience depends on broader and more robust talent pools," the report read. "Limiting women's full workforce participation, especially in emerging and strategic sectors like Technology, Energy, and Infrastructure, is a risk to economic growth."
Meanwhile, the WEF further pointed out that men and women continue to cluster around specific sectors, with women highly concentrated in "people-focused" industries.
Women remain overrepresented in Healthcare and Care Services (58.5%), as well as Education (52.9%).
These are "sectors critical to social infrastructure but that often have lower pay, capital intensity, and long-term economic scaling potential," according to the WEF report.
"Better gender balance across sectors can boost innovation, address talent shortages, and close wage gaps – in both industries that drive future economic growth and industries that sustain growth as part of the care economy," it read.
The report also noted that women are more likely to be in roles that are anticipated to be disrupted by generative AI, while their participation in the technology, information, and media industry is showing signs of retention challenges.
"Men are more highly represented at every career stage, especially in the STEM C-suite," the report said.
But it also underscored that AI transformation can also help break gender disparities, noting that female AI talent on LinkedIn has expanded significantly between 2018 and 2025.
"Ensuring women are not left out of these emerging sectors is key to building resilient, future-ready economies," the WEF report said.
The WEF's Global Gender Gap Report 2025, covering 148 economies, noted that this year marked the strongest annual advancement since COVID-19 after the gender gap narrowed to 68.8%.
Iceland emerged as the world's most gender-equal economy with 92.6% of its gender gap closed. This is followed by:
"At a time of heightened global economic uncertainty and a low growth outlook combined with technological and demographic change, advancing gender parity represents a key force for economic renewal," said Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director, World Economic Forum, in a statement.
"The evidence is clear. Economies that have made decisive progress towards parity are positioning themselves for stronger, more innovative and more resilient economic progress."
