YOU CAN’T BE ‘a little bit pregnant’, as the saying goes, but you can be ‘a little bit equal’.

2018 could be another big year. The fallout from several high profile cases of sexual harassment, and worse, has awakened anger at the persistent failure of society to root out abuse and violence against women.

According to the UN, for example, about 1-in-12 Irish women have been the victim of sexual violence in the last 12 months, more than half of these by someone other than an intimate partner.

Meanwhile, a successful campaign to repeal the Eighth would extend fuller reproductive rights to women for the first time on the island of Ireland. Mná na h’Éireann are calling time on being treated as second class citizens.

A lot done, more to do

Yet another part of our Constitution, Article 41.2, continues to recognise the importance of a woman’s ‘life within the home’. It shouldn’t really come as much surprise then that, despite significant progress, women have yet to achieve full equality in the worlds of school, work or business.

So, let’s look in more detail at these 3 E’s: education, employment and entrepreneurship.

Education

First, the good news. Girls get better grades (except in maths), on average, and are now more likely to graduate with a third level degree.

So, it’s certainly not talent or application holding women back when they enter the workforce.

Women are still significantly under-represented in STEM (science, technology and mathematics) studies, however, and over-represented in health and education, with little change in recent years.

Employment

In every country, there are less women in work, working less hours, and getting paid less for every hour they do work. And yes, globally the gap has been closing, albeit at a snail’s pace.

For shame, however, Ireland is one of the countries where the gender pay gap is actually getting wider. Between 2010 and 2015, the gap jumped from 12.8% to 14.4% (for the median, or ‘woman in the middle of the distribution’), higher than it was even in 2005.

Women in Ireland are less likely than men to be in the workforce, but there are differences depending on education level and, particularly, whether the woman has a child or not. The gender employment gap is three times higher for women with low education levels than for those with higher education.

Strikingly, this gender employment gap is nearly a quarter for women with at least one child, but almost disappears for women with no children.

Late last year, the Royal Irish Academy published a report, entitled Fixing the leaky pipeline and retaining our talent, noting that women are more likely than men to drop out of STEM careers altogether, while those that remained face barriers to promotion. While half of academic lecturers are female, this share falls to less than one in five at full professor level. There is a similar pattern in junior versus senior management positions in the private sector.

Entrepreneurship

Men in Ireland are three times more likely to be self-employed than women.

Meanwhile, men who are self-employed are nearly three times more likely to themselves employ staff and earn, on average, nearly 30% more than are their female counterparts.

This entrepreneurship gender gap appears to be very gradually narrowing, and is lower among younger cohorts, but some countries have achieved far greater progress than Ireland in this regard.

Womenomics can benefit all

Less women workers, lower women’s wages and fewer female business leaders is not just bad for women. It holds back economic growth, meaning lower living standards for all.

Leakage from the STEM fields as happens at present means Ireland’s human capital is not being used to the full in cutting edge sectors, undermining our capacity to innovate and to operate at the technology frontier.

Gender equality should be the norm regardless, but it can clearly improve men’s lives too. So, we need more win-win public policies to flip the switch – what similar efforts in Japan have been termed ‘womenomics’.

What can we do to start making gender equality the new normal? Here’s seven steps for a start:

What better way to mark the centenary of 1918 by those jockeying to form our next government committing to meaningful reforms that make gender equality the new reality.

Victor Duggan is an economist.