‘Remote work critical to bridging gender gap in workplaces’

Remote work has been described as a very critical tool to bridging gender gap in workplaces.

According the Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index (WTI), innovation surges when diversity increases, and one thing that remote and hybrid workplaces have enabled is more diverse hiring. The WTI notes that remote-work opportunities were found to be more attractive to diverse applicants such as women and other jobseekers who are currently within the age range of 18 and 25.

Country Manager, Microsoft Nigeria, Ola Williams, stated that: “For gendered diversity in the workplace, remote work is driving much-needed improvement. Global statistics on gender equality in employment reveal a deeply entrenched disparity, with men participating more in the labour force and advancing more within it than their female counterparts.

“Alarmingly, if we remain on the current hiring and promoting trajectory, it will take just over 135 years to close the gender gap worldwide. This was the finding of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its latest 2021 Global Gender Gap Report.

“The pandemic has served to widen this gap, with WEF sharing early projections that show five percent of all employed women lost their jobs in the resulting economic disruption, compared with 3.9 percent of employed men. Women are also poorly represented in the ‘jobs of the future’ sector.”

Williams further noted that: “Such roles arose alongside digital transformation, which accelerated rapidly in response to the pandemic with businesses being forced to operate online during lockdown closures of physical spaces.

“WEF found that only two of the eight jobs of the future that they tracked had reached gender equality. For example, there are only 32.4 percent of women in Data and AI-focused roles across the world. Employment gender parity in Nigeria.

“Out of the 156 countries surveyed globally, Nigeria comes in at 139 on the list for overall gender parity, placing it at number 32 out of the 35 countries surveyed across sub-Saharan Africa.

“Nigeria fares far better looking at gendered hiring and promoting, ranking 78 globally in the Economic Participation and Opportunity category. While participation between men and women in the country’s labour force shows slight disparity (19.9 million women versus 22.9 million men), senior roles are largely gendered in favour of men. Just under 14 percent of Nigeria’s firms have women in top management positions. Clearly, more work must be done to bridge the employment gender divide in Nigeria.”

He concluded that: “Being able to work remotely has opened many new career opportunities for workers across the globe. Not being confined to one geographical area means the ability to accept jobs based anywhere. As the WTI notes, ‘this fundamental shift expands economic opportunity for individuals and enables organisations to build high-performing, diverse teams from a near-limitless talent pool.”