UN: Gender discrimination costs Asia-Pacific economies tens of billions per year | The Raw Story: Discrimination against women hampers progress in alleviating world poverty and costs Asia-Pacific economies tens of billions of dollars a year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday.
“Gender discrimination blocks progress. Equality makes it possible to achieve huge breakthroughs,” Ban told an international meeting for young female leaders during a visit to his native South Korea.
Women make up a fraction of all chief executives of the world’s biggest companies, fewer than one in ten national leaders are female and fewer than one in five parliamentarians are women, he said in a speech.
“The lack of women’s representation — of women’s empowerment — affects individual women’s rights — and it holds back whole countries,” Ban said.
One recent UN study, he said, showed that limits on women’s economic participation cost the Asia-Pacific region nearly $90 billion a year in lost productivity.
