Ladies first? Namibia slips in global gender ranking

THE corporate world is not doing enough to achieve gender equality in the workplace, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said, placing Namibia 32nd out of 134 countries worldwide on its latest Global Gender Gap Index.

The gender ladder shows Namibia has slipped from the 30 spot in the 2008 report, as well as from the 29th place the year before that.
In 2006, Namibia held the 38 the position.
The top five are Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand.
In the region, South Africa tops the scoreboard and took the sixth place, with Lesotho in the 10th position, followed by Mozambique at number 26. Botswana (39th), Tanzania (73rd), Malawi (77th), Madagascar (78th), Zimbabwe (96th), Mauritius (97th), Angola (106th) and Zambia (107th) all fared worse than Namibia.
“The findings of the report are an alarm bell that the corporate world is not doing enough to achieve gender equality,” Saadia Zahidi, Co-author of the report and head of the Forum’s Women Leaders and Gender Parity Programme at the WEF, said.
“While a certain set of companies in Scandinavia, the US and the UK are indeed leaders in integrating women, the idea that most corporations have become gender-balanced or women-friendly is still a myth,” she said.
Released on Monday, the WEF report is the first study to cover the world’s largest employers in 20 countries and benchmark them against the gender equality policies that most companies should have in place.
The report stressed that female employees tend to be concentrated in entry or mid-level positions, and remain scarce in senior management or board positions in most countries and industries.
A major exception to this trend is Norway, where the percentage of women among boards of directors is above 40 per cent for the majority of respondents.
This is due to a government regulation that mandates a minimum of 40 per cent of each gender on the boards of public companies.
Although wage gaps between women and men are a universally recognised problem, 72 per cent of the companies surveyed do not attempt to track salary gaps at all.
However, a more positive revelation is that almost 40 per cent of the companies surveyed claim to be setting specified targets, quotas or other affirmative policies to improve women’s participation in their structures.
It said with the exception of Mexico and Brazil, the majority of companies in most countries claim to offer longer-term leave or career breaks for parents or caregivers.
According to the report, the biggest barriers to women’s access to leadership positions identified by the respondents are general norms and cultural practices in that country, masculine or patriarchal corporate culture, and lack of role models.
The least important barriers are identified as a lack of adequate parental leave and benefits, and inadequate labour laws and regulations in a country.
Out of the countries covered in the report since 2006, more than two-thirds have posted gains in overall index scores, indicating that the world in general has made progress towards equality between men and women, although there are countries that continue to lose ground.
– Own report and Nampa