Achieving the economic potential of women in work could add $2.1 trillion in GDP in 2025 or 0.8 percent to annual GDP growth in the United States over the next decade.
Every state and city can make further progress toward gender parity and add at least 5 percent to their GDP, and half of US states can add more than 10 percent.
Worldwide, enhancing women’s economic potential has gone hand in hand with achieving greater social gender equality. Based on the relationship between capturing economic opportunity and tackling societal barriers to women’s economic participation, MGI has taken a broad view of gender inequality in the United States using ten indicators of gender equality in work and society.
US gender inequality is low or medium on four: labor-force participation rate, professional and technical jobs, higher education, and maternal mortality. Inequality is high or extremely high on six: leadership and managerial positions, unpaid care work, single mothers, teenage pregnancy, political representation, and violence against women. These six should be prioritized as “impact zones” for action. To give an idea of the considerable challenges that the United States faces, there are just 66 women for every 100 men in business leadership and managerial positions, women do almost double the unpaid care work that men do, and there is one incident of sexual violence for every two women in the United States.