Dare the Difference

• Author: Christine Lagarde
• Position: the IMF’s Managing Director.

Straight Talk

The world has changed in dramatic and sometimes unexpected ways since I was a girl. Plenty of changes have been for the better—improvements in technology or medicine for example. Others have not helped. In particular, I worry about inequality and the environment. The evolving situation of women at work is also very important to me. It is one area where there has been tremendous progress, yet not nearly enough. More troubling, progress appears to be faltering.Â

There are, of course, enormous differences in the condition of women around the world. Far too many are still fighting for the most fundamental of human rights—safety, health, education. These women are always on my mind and we should do all we can to support them.Â

For them, striving for gender balance at work or in business is far from the most pressing issue. However, whether it is the fight for fundamental rights or the fight for equal status in the workplace, I believe it is part of the same story. We are all trying to remove obstacles and create opportunities that will allow women to achieve their full potential and, in doing so, help lift us all to a higher economic growth plane.Â

Glass struggles

Despite overwhelming evidence that gender inclusion makes economic, business, and social sense, we are not closing gender gaps fast enough. Women still face glass ceilings, glass walls, and even glass cliffs.Â

I hear this again and again from women I meet when I visit IMF member countries: around the world there is still too big a gulf between the opportunities available to men and women. Put simply, women are less likely than men to join the job market, women still earn less than men, and women are much less likely to reach top management positions.Â

Women may be half the working-age population, but they represent less than one-third of the actual labor force. The bigger worry, as plenty of recent commentary points out, is that progress toward gender equality seems to have stalled. For a decade or more, women’s participation in the workforce has been stuck at about 50 percent, whereas male participation has remained consistently—and comfortably—close to 80 percent.

These global averages mask wide regional variations. The situation is starkest in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, where about 80 percent of working-age women do not participate in the labor market.Â

Even when let into the labor market, women too often remain second-class citizens. Women in paid...