Sri Lankan women make half of what their male counterparts do in employment.
This is above regional peer Bangladesh wherein women make $.12 for every $1 their male counterparts do but less than India where women make $.64 for every $1 their male counterparts make.
Women are also less likely to establish themselves as entrepreneurs and if they decide to join wage labour, they are underpaid. 1 in 25 female wage earners are employed within domestic work.
67.1 million people are involved in domestic work. 81.5 percent of domestic workers are female. 11.5 million domestic workers are international migrants. 74.3 percent of the international domestic workers are female.
Professor of Economics University of Peradeniya Dileni Gunawardena detailed these figures at a Centre for Banking Studies lecture held on 18 August.
Female labour is also likely to be time-poor. Time poverty is a measure of the amount of time one has outside their employment and female workers work on average more than their male counterparts.
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen estimates that every year 4 million women are missing from the population. This phenomenon is caused by sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and inadequate healthcare and nutrition for female children. It is argued that technologies that enable prenatal sex selection, which has been commercially available since the 1970s, are a large impetus for missing female children.
It is estimated that if the world moved to be in line with gender parity there would be an additional US$ 28 trillion to the global economy.
If regional countries were just to match the best regional peer in terms of gender parity there would be an additional US$ 12 trillion to the global economy.
Gunawardane called on stakeholders to realize the importance of unpaid work in the economy. Globally women are less likely to be property-owning than males. Women may also be limited from achieving their full economic potential by their husbands.
Gunawardane tracking male and female incomes found that women tend to have a pivotal shift downwards in their earning potential after the birth of a child.
This is not the case for their male counterparts.
Globally female labour force participation in the period from 1990 to 2013 has remained stagnant near 50 percent while in South Asia, it has declined from 35 percent to 30 percent.
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