At a time when there is an acute shortage of welders and other tradespeople, hardly any women are being trained for these and other well-paying jobs. This more than 40 years after Congress banned sex discrimination in American education. Experts offer several reasons for this split, including gender stereotypes and the threat of workplace harassment in male-dominated jobs. But employers and advocates agree it’s hurting both women and the economy, leaving families stuck in poverty and businesses scrambling for workers in fields, such as IT and advanced manufacturing, where they’re growing troublingly scarce.

For full-time employees, men were paid more than women across the board last year, the Office for National Statistics said in a report published Wednesday. At almost 25 percent, the gap is largest in skilled trades -- the most male-dominated of all the occupations. The smallest difference is in sales and customer service, where the workforce is almost evenly split between the genders.

“The GDP is sexist because it adopts a framework of value creation and productivity that is traditionally anchored on individualistic, male-dominated activities,” says Lorenzo Fioramonti, professor of political economy at the University of Pretoria and author of The World After GDP. “It relegates all activities that have to do with care, nurturing, and community support—[which are] traditionally performed by women—to the margins of economic value creation.”

With the recent success of companies like The Honest Company and Thinx, we’re seeing a new rise of women-centered innovation: products and services designed for women by women, based on the pain points women experience in daily life. The investment ecosystem is unprepared to understand this opportunity, much less identify, invest in, and nurture this next generation of companies. The coming shift will have deep implications for the role women will play in the future of business, tech, and innovation.

Between October 2016 and October 2017, women who worked in the country’s stores lost 160,300 jobs, while 106,000 men found new work in the field, the analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found. Economy & Business Alerts Breaking news about economic and business issues. Sign up “We’ve seen many news reports of the decline in retail jobs, but few have noted that the picture in retail is much different for women and men,” researchers at the Washington think tank wrote. Over the past year, they added, “women’s share of all retail trade jobs fell from 50.4 to 49.6 percent.”

A better work participation rate among women alone can increase the gross domestic product by up to 10 percentage points, a new Standard & Poor's report shows. The New York-based financial service company looked at data from the 1990s to 2016 for countries from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of developed nations that promotes world trade and democracy. The report's findings: The U.S. economy would be $1.6 trillion larger today if American women entered and remained in the workforce at the same rate as women from Norway. Another way to conceive of the increase: $1.6 trillion would translate to roughly $5,000 more for every American.

Historians and economists will likely debate whether she was unfairly pushed aside because of her gender. But few can argue that she is exiting on a high. “She deserves to go out on a standing ovation,” Swonk said.

"The research shows having more women in decision-making roles has clear benefits …This is not a 'nice to have'," McLean said. "I'd argue gender parity is a common sense priority for businesses wanting to boost the diversity of thought, experience and skills in their organisation. All these things lead to better business performance."

On Wall Street, Mary Gage found herself frustrated with being shut out of stockbroking on venues like the New York Stock Exchange, the artery of America’s growing place on the international financial stage. So, in 1880, the finance-savvy associate of suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton started her own exchange—just for women—who wanted to use their own money to speculate on railroad stocks.

With less population growth across Asia, increased pressure is being placed on older and more conservative generations — mostly men — to continue working, while younger and more progressive demographics, which should include more women, struggle to fill the growing demand.

The result of this imbalance, according to Jacobsen, is a misrepresentation on a broader economic scale in the GDP. If work is unpaid, it isn’t included in “production,” and since women do the bulk of this informal work around the world, their contribution has been devalued.