Gender Parity’s $12 Trillion Economic Opportunity

Earlier this month, I attended the Dreamforce conference, one of the world’s largest software conferences held annually in San Francisco. PowerToFly is a customer of Salesforce, so my original plan was to attend the conference to learn more about product innovations. But to my pleasant surprise, there were over 75 sessions on women and equality in the workplace!

I diverted plans from checking out product pitches to spend the better part of the week learning about amazing people trying to change minds and attitudes at their respective companies about diversity and inclusion. At PowerToFly, we’re working to improve recruiting practices and get more women in tech positions at companies that care about diversity and inclusion, so these panels and sessions were all incredibly mission-aligned to our daily work.

A session I attended titled “How Can You Add $12 Trillion to the Global Economy?” got me asking: how can you really add that much to the economy?

There was not an answer provided during the session so I read a report by McKinsey Global Institute, The power of parity: How advancing women’s equality can add $12 trillion to global growth. The authors of the report also wrote a medium article about their findings as well. Lots of great nuggets of information are provided in the entire 168 page report (if you have the time, definitely worth the read).

Looking at the gender parity ratio calculated by a number of key factors, I was saddened to learn that the United States is among the 10 regions that have 93% of the world’s female population and also have high gender inequality. The entire list of regions include (High Gender Inequality) North America, Oceania — 0.74; Western Europe 0.71; Eastern Europe, Central Asia — 0.67; Latin America — 0.64; and East & South Asia — 0.62. And (Extreme Gender Inequality) China — 0.61, and Sub-Saharan Africa — 0.57. A perfect score of “1.00” is equal to Gender Parity.

The Gender Parity Ratio is calculated based on two primary areas across the following 15 indicators:

• Gender equality in work — indicators include:

Labor-force participation, professional and technical jobs, perceived wage gap for similar work, leadership positions, and unpaid care work

• Gender equality in society — indicators include three sub areas:

Essential services and enablers of economic opportunity: unmet need for family planning, maternal mortality per 100,000 births, education level, financial inclusion, and digital inclusion

Legal protection and political voice: legal protection and political representation

Physical security and autonomy: ex ratio at birth, child marriage (% of girls and young women), and violence against women

I was pleasantly surprised (as a mom, first and foremost) that the report pointed to the fact that if we simply added more “paid” workers (i.e. stay-at-home mom workers, women who are working for no pay) we could add $12 trillion more to GDP.

We must do a better job recruiting women. We must move towards equal pay for women. And of course, we must hire more women.

Oh, and guess what? PowerToFly is here to help recruiters and hiring managers find and hire more women —doing our part to contribute to the ‘power of parity.’