Yahoo Finance The shocking stats for women around the world
International Women’s Day aims to unite women in a common aim - to be treated equally.
But statistics from around the world remind us that despite ongoing effort to deliver equality, the position of women, their health, what they earn and more differs hugely across the globe.
From politics to sport, business to crime, women’s experiences vary widely from country to country.
Here are some statistics that reveal what life is like for women across the world:
Worldwide, women only have three-quarters of the employment rights of men, the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law index found last month. It found that in the Middle East and North Africa, women still have half the rights of men.
According to Unesco figures in 2014, 31 million girls were out of school in the world, while two thirds of the world’s 774 million illiterate adults were women.
The figures also showed that 54 million of the 76 million illiterate young women lived in only nine countries.
According to Unesco, in 2014 less than a third (29%) of the world’s researchers were women.
Women in Asia and the Pacific do just over four times more unpaid care work than men, figures from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) revealed.
In more than 90 years of the Oscars, only five women have been nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Director and there has only been one female winner, in 2010. Women in Hollywood also reportedly earn on average around $1.1m less than their male counterparts.
In 2019, the prize money for the FIFA Women’s World Cup was $30 million across all 24 teams, compared to $400 million for the 2018 men’s World Cup, which is set to rise to $440m for the 2020 World Cup.
Women in Hong Kong have the highest life expectancy at 88.17, according to the latest United Nations Population Division estimates. That’s compared to an average female life expectancy of 75.6.
The country with the lowest female life expectancy is Central Africa Republic, where women are expected to live to 56.58.
According to the UN, as of February 2019 only 24.3% of all national parliamentarians were women. It found that globally there were 27 States where women accounted for less than 10% of parliamentarians in single or lower houses, including three chambers with no women at all.
As of June 2019, 11 women were serving as head of state and 12 as head of government.
