 Hi, I'm Salvatore Babonis and today's lecture is using the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report. The World Economic Forum, or WEF, is a gathering of the world's rich and well-connected held every year in January in Davos, Switzerland. The avowed mission of the WEF is to improve the state of the world through public-private cooperation. That said, the organization is much more controversial than that sounds because it is a forum where government leaders meet very informally on very clubby terms with billionaires and business leaders so public-private cooperation can sound very noble, but it can also be very controversial when highly privileged people have special access to politicians, especially democratically elected politicians from countries where their voters don't necessarily have the same access. That said, the WEF does have a standing secretariat that works year-round to put together data and reports in support of this mission, and when you're an organization that has a membership fee that runs into the tens of millions of dollars, you actually have the resources to put together high-quality data in a way that most NGOs simply don't. As a result, the WEF is one of the few organizations in the world that actually brings together a large array of information on gender inequality. And today we're going to look at the WEF's Global Gender Gap Report. As of recording, which is March 2018, the Global Gender Gap Report for 2017 is only available in PDF, so we're going to focus on the Global Gender Gap Report for 2016 for which the website has already been completely built out. There's a link here to the report, we'll go to the website, where we'll be able to choose on a country-by-country basis which country's data we'd like to look at on gender-related issues. So if you look at the left-hand column, you can select a country profile, and I'm going to start with Australia as a country to look at, and you'll see that automatically it'll pull up the information for Australia. Now, if you want to get this report in something you can print out, you can actually download a PDF of the Australia handout, so to speak, a simple two-page summary of the data for Australia, and you can do that obviously for any country. I'm going to focus on just a few statistics here. First is how the WEF ranks each country. Australia has been ranked number 46 for the gender gap, that's 46 from the best. Number one is the best, number 146 is the worst. The WEF makes Iceland out to be number one, and in general Scandinavian countries plus New Zealand score very high, meaning that they have very low gender gaps. The statistic here, 0.721, is meant to be a summary indicator of how close women are to achieving parity with men. So the WEF is making the claim that in Australia women have 72.1% parity with men. It's difficult to quantify these things, and it's not certain exactly what that means, but it's where they place Australia. What the WEF does do that's very useful for us as data consumers is pull together lots of information from different data sources in one place. So for example, if you want to know Australia's GDP per capita, that's the amount of money per capita available in Australia, that's 43,655. Now note that is constant 2011 international dollars in purchasing power parity terms. Now we're not going to go into the details of all that here, but essentially what that means is these are standardized US dollars made in a standard scale for comparison. Australia's actual GDP per capita in 2016 was actually probably closer to about $50,000, but these are converted to 2011 equivalent dollars. So long story short, it's an equivabilization scale used that allows us to put each country's data on a similar scale. So what this tells us is Australia is a relatively rich country. It also has Australia's population here about 24 million, meaning it's a large-ish but not extremely large country. What I'm particularly interested in for this lecture are the scorecard items for the gender gap, and there are two I'm going to focus on in particular. The labor force participation rate, labor force participation ranked 55 in the world, and if we go across we find the female to male ratio is 86%. That means female labor force participation, which in Australia is 71%, is 86% of the male labor force participation, which in Australia is 82%. What these numbers mean is that in Australia 71% of all adult women of working age are in labor force, 82% of adult men of working age are in the labor force, and the ratio there, the women's percentage of the male score is 86%. Now in the view of the world economic form, an ideal score there would be 100%, meaning that whatever the level of labor force participation, it's the same for men and women. Now no country in the world has 100% labor force participation. There are lots of reasons why people might not be in the labor force. They may be retiring early. They may be taking time off to care for children or to care for parents. They may be in full-time schooling instead of actually in the labor force, or they may simply not want to work. They may be incapacitated and unable to work. So there are lots of reasons why labor force participation is never 100%. What we care about in this statistic is that there not be a disadvantage for women. So this figure that women's labor force participation is only 86% of the male level indicates that when people drop out of the labor market, it's disproportionately women who do so. More women are staying home for whatever reason. Now it's most likely because they're caring for children or for the elderly, but it could also be that they're out of the labor market because there are no good jobs for them, so they choose not to work. There could be many different reasons why people are out of the labor market, but what we'd like to see is that those reasons don't impinge on women any more than they impinge on men. So if male labor force participation is 82% in a gender-equal world with no gender gap, we would expect female labor force participation to also be around 82%. But in Australia, there's a gap, and the gap is 14 percentage points, that is, it's 86%, not 100%. Similarly, we'd like to look at wage equality for similar work. Now, again, the WEF makes Australia to be out to be number 60 in the world in this, so not very high, and it gives Australia an average female wage compared to the male wage for similar work of 66% that women are making only two thirds of what men make. Now, I don't know where they get that data. The Australian government makes the gap out to be something like, you know, 85%, women make 15% less than men. But this is something that's very difficult to measure. The WEF is not very transparent about its methodology or its data source. It simply is conducted a survey, and this is the answer they get to come up with, and it's presented here as data. So we have to be a little bit skeptical about that. I suspect that Australia is not so far down the totem pole in the world that similar pay for similar work in Australia is number 60 in the world, and that women only make two thirds of what men make for the same work. I find that very unlikely for Australia. Yet, these are the data we have in the WEF report. You can find lots of other data about women's status, including one of my favorites, women in parliament, which in Australia they make out to be 36% of parliament being female, or I'm sorry, that the women have 36% as much representation as men. And, you know, you can look down into the detailed data on the second page and find lots of indicators. There'll be some missing data here because the detailed indicators are not present for every statistic for every country. But you should be able to find for most countries these summary metrics of status of women in the gender gap. Now, that's Australia, and remember that in Australia the two key statistics I focused on were women's labour force participation is only 86% of male, and women's pay is only 66% of men for the same work. Now, I'd like to look at a developing country, and I'm going to look at China. We hear a lot about China in the news, and of course China is the largest developing country in the world. China is ranked somewhere below Australia. It's ranked only 99th for gender equality. In other words, the gap between genders is larger in China than in Australia. The World Economic Forum makes it out that women are 67.6% two-thirds of the way towards full parity with men in China. Again, it's hard to know exactly what that means. China is a much poorer country than Australia. Remember Australia's GDP per capita was up around $43,000, $44,000. On that same scale, China's GDP per capita is only $13,400. Now again, I have to stress these are equalized scales. If you go to the web and you look up China's GDP per capita, you'll find it's actually much lower than that. But this is adjusting for the cost of living. It's in US dollars. It's in 2011 dollars. We're not so concerned with the absolute level as in using this to compare countries because in the WEF report, all countries are being compared on the same scale. Of course, China's population is enormously larger than Australia's, one point nearly 1.4 billion largest country in the world, though soon to be overtaken by India. If I look at the detailed scores for China, I find for labor force participation, China ranks 57, women have 84% as much labor force participation as men do. Remember that's very close to Australia. Australia was 86%. So in China, female labor force participation is 70% of all women, male is 84% of all men, meaning at the ratio, female labor force participation as a percent of male labor force participation is 84%. Now that's not as good as in Australia where it was 86%, but it's really close. And considering that China is a much poorer country, a much less developed country, that might be interpreted as being a very good statistic that China is converging to Australia despite being a much, much poorer country. Similarly, if you look at wage inequality, wage equality for similar work, China ranks 70th in the world. And according to the WEF survey, China has 65% wage equality. That is, for every dollar a man makes, a woman in the same job makes 65 cents. Now, I don't know if that's the correct figure for China. I find it striking that in Australia, the WEF made it out to be 66% in China 65%. Now, my own impression as a comparative sociologist is that gender inequality in terms of equal pay for equal work is much worse than China than it is in Australia. This is not reflected in the data here, though. Can I trust the data? I don't know. You know, we always have to be a bit skeptical, you know, how much do we trust our instincts and how much do we trust the data. On the other hand, we also have to question our instincts. You know, am I believing that Australia must be better than China simply because Australia is a developed country and is a democracy? You know, maybe it's my own biases that are leading me to doubt the veracity of the figures. So again, we just always have to be on the one hand skeptical of the data, but on the other hand skeptical of ourselves. Again, for China, there are data on women in parliament, 31%. So women's representation is 31% of the male level. But again, you have to interpret that in light of the fact that China does not have a true democracy in its parliament in the same way that Australia does. Once again, lots of detailed data for China. Okay, going back to the slideshow, I'd like to highlight some key takeaways. First, the world economic forum is a great source of data, but it is a it is controversial as a forum where government leaders network with business executives really outside the glare of public scrutiny. Second, despite these concerns, the WEF global gender gap report has become an indispensable source of quick information on gender inequality. That said, the data collected in the gender gap report are of highly variable quality. I really have to stress as a final point that the global gender gap report doesn't go out into the world and collect data on its own. Instead, what they do is collect data from many different sources and attempt to equalize it and to bring it together in one place, which means that data from some sources may not be as high quality or as trustworthy or even on the same scale as data from other sources. So we do have to use it with caution. You might even say with a little bit of a grain of salt when making big comparisons or drawing policy implications. Thanks for listening. You can find out more about me at my website at Salvadorofabonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asia newsletter. I hope you enjoyed the lecture.