This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.
Author: Charlotte Edmond, Senior Writer, Forum Agenda
This article was orginally published on 24 July 2023. It was updated on 3 August 2023.
- Spain is launching a new app to highlight the uneven way household chores are typically shared out between men and women in the country.The “invisible” chores all add up and create a mental load that is usually shouldered by women, research shows.The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report shows it will take another 131 years before gender parity is reached.
It may be a gender stereotype, but it is also a truism: around the world, on average, women do far more household chores than men. Now the Spanish government has created an app to see just how true that is in each household – and encourage men to share the burden.The free app will allow each member of the household to track how much time they spend on domestic chores, reports The Guardian. It’s also designed to highlight all the often invisible jobs that are necessary to keep a house running smoothly.For example, although washing the dishes might only take 20 minutes, before that someone has to plan out meals, shop for ingredients, and buy the washing-up liquid, explained Ángela Rodríguez, second-in-command in Spain’s Ministry of Equality, as she announced the plans.The “mental load” for these chores often falls to women, she said.
Whose turn is it to do the dishes?
Just under half of women perform the majority of housework in Spain, compared to just 15% of men, according to a survey published by the country’s statistics agency in 2022.
What’s the World Economic Forum doing about the gender gap?
The World Economic Forum has been measuring gender gaps since 2006 in the annual Global Gender Gap Report.The Global Gender Gap Report tracks progress towards closing gender gaps on a national level. To turn these insights into concrete action and national progress, we have developed the Gender Parity Accelerator model for public private collaboration.These accelerators have been convened in twelve countries across three regions. Accelerators are established in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Panama in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean, Egypt and Jordan in the Middle East and North Africa, and Japan and Kazakhstan in Asia.All Country Accelerators, along with Knowledge Partner countries demonstrating global leadership in closing gender gaps, are part of a wider ecosystem, the Global Learning Network, that facilitates exchange of insights and experiences through the Forum’s platform
.In these countries CEOs and ministers are working together in a three-year time frame on policies that help to further close the economic gender gaps in their countries. This includes extended parental leave, subsidized childcare and making recruitment, retention and promotion practices more gender inclusive.
If you are a business in one of the Gender Parity Accelerator countries you can join the local membership base.If you are a business or government in a country where we currently do not have a Gender Parity Accelerator you can reach out to us to explore opportunities for setting one up.
The World Economic Forum’s own research demonstrates a marginal improvement in the global gender gap since last year. However, the rate of change has slowed significantly since the pandemic.
At the current rate of progress, it will take 131 years to reach parity, although nine of the top 10 countries have closed their gender gap by at
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