Gender Equality Would Turbocharge the Economy

Raise your hand if you want to add $12 trillion to the world’s economy over the next decade. …Is everyone’s hand raised? Good news! Researchers say we can make it happen by addressing gender inequality.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, improving economic, legal, and political conditions for women would have an overwhelmingly positive impact on the world economy—and we don’t even need to reach full gender parity to achieve that $12 trillion figure. That would only require what they call a “best in region” scenario, in which “all countries match the rate of improvement of the fastest-improving country in their region.”

In other words, if nations merely keep up with the Joneses on measures of gender equality (even if the Joneses themselves don’t have perfect records here), everyone will be a lot richer and we’ll all be better off.

By the way, if we did reach full gender equality across the globe, the world economy would get a boost to the tune of $28 trillion (!).

No wonder the world’s biggest economies are banding together to promote “gender-inclusive economic growth”—there’s big money in it for them!

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About the Author

Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.