When heads of state from the Group of 20 most industrialised nations gather for their annual summit in Mexico next week, there’ll be four women in the family photograph.
Take a look at national parliaments and corporate boardrooms across much of the G20 and the male-to-female ratio doesn’t get much better – and in some cases it’s a lot worse.
Yes, women’s rights have come far in past decades but the statistics show we still live in a man’s world.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in countries like India, where females are killed at birth and burned alive in dowry-related disputes, or in Saudi Arabia, where women are banned from driving and virtually every aspect of their lives is controlled by men.
The widespread practices of infanticide, child marriage and gender-based violence were the main reasons why experts ranked India the worst place in the G20 for women in a perceptions poll published today by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation.
