Business16 September, 20262 min read
World Economic Forum Says Sub-Saharan Africa Will Take 102 Years To Close Gender Gap
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Sub-Saharan Africa will take 102 years to close its gender gap. Global gender gap is 69.2% closed; full parity may take 120 years.
WEF: parity timeline
The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Gender Gap Report says Sub-Saharan Africa has closed 68.8% of its gender gap and, at the current pace, will take another 102 years to reach full parity. The same report ranks the region sixth of eight regions, behind Europe, Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Asia and the Pacific, and Central Asia, and says no economy has reached full parity.
Globally, the report puts the gender gap at 69.2% closed and estimates full parity 120 years away, while also warning that progress is “fragile.” The WEF report also says Iceland leads for the 17th consecutive year at 93% and that every economy in the top 10 has closed at least 81% of its gap, with Namibia the only Sub-Saharan economy in that group.
AI adds a penalty
A separate WEF-linked report highlighted by This is Money says women face a ‘triple penalty’ from the rise of artificial intelligence as many of their jobs are wiped out while men dominate roles created by the new technology. It says the WEF report found women represent just a quarter of new AI hires and one in eight AI executives, and WEF managing director Saadia Zahidi warned that the new industry risks replicating the inequalities of the past.
Sue Duke of LinkedIn said: ‘Women today face a triple penalty in the AI economy. ‘They’re under-represented in AI roles, they’re under-represented in AI firms and they are very significantly under-represented in AI leadership.’ The same coverage ties the imbalance to recruitment from high-fliers in STEM and says the existing field of software engineering is already male-dominated, while also noting that taking career breaks can have a bigger impact in an industry moving at an extraordinarily fast pace.
Leadership, education, and risk
The WEF report described by DW says women still hold fewer than a fifth of chief executive officer (CEO) positions and only one in 10 ministerial roles held by women is considered high influence. DW also reports that fewer than one in five AI engineers are women and that they are underrepresented at every level of AI firms, while the report warns that full parity may still be 120 years away.
In the same WEF framing, the report says the percentage of countries led by women peaked in 2022 and has now fallen back to 2016 levels, and it quotes Saadia Zahidi saying parity is “not inevitable.” The National’s coverage of the same WEF index says education is closest to equality, with the remaining global gap projected to close in eight years if progress continues at its current pace, while political empowerment is furthest from parity with only 22.1% of the gap closed and full parity estimated 194 years away.