Gender Wealth Gap(GWG) in APAC Largest in India at 64%: A new study reveals that India has the highest gender wealth gap (64%) compared to other APAC countries. This is largely due to the high burden of caregiving responsibilities. The 2022 WTW Global Gender Wealth Equity report found that opportunities for women in leadership positions are also limited, with only 3% of the workforce occupying senior positions in India.
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What Has Been Said:
“Women also tend to assume childcare responsibilities at a young age for the region, resulting in financial impacts from which women have limited capacity to recover. Compounding this is that long term financial decisions generally rest with men and financial literacy for working women tends to be lower,” stated the report.
World Scenario:
South Korea has been found to be the best performing country in the APAC region in terms of the gender wealth gap. “In South Korea, the earnings limits embedded in social security benefits limit the accumulation of male relative to female wealth,” the report said. According to the report, there are 12 markets in the APAC region where there are gender wealth gaps that range from 64% in India to 90% in South Korea.
Women, when they retire from work, will just have 74 per cent of the wealth accumulated by men. The report said APAC has one of the lowest global wealth gaps on average for gender wealth equity. Women in the region are projected to have wealth levels that are just two points over the global average and just over three-quarters, or 76%, of men’s wealth levels.
The Case At Higher Levels:
The study shows that overall, the gender wealth gap at retirement increases with seniority. At the global level, women in senior expert and leadership roles were found to have less than two-thirds or just 62 per cent of the accumulated wealth of their male counterparts at the time of retirement. A substantial gap of 69 per cent was found at the mid-level professional and technical roles, but it narrowed considerably to 89 per cent for frontline operational roles.
The Best Performing Countries:
According to the report, a total of six markets included in the analysis have higher wealth indexes for women in retirement than the global average, and these include China (78 per cent), Japan (82 per cent), Philippines (79 per cent) and Singapore (79 per cent).
