Closing the gap

Imagine that you are thrown into a fist fight against a fully abled opponent, but one of your hands has been tied behind your back. Your ability to compete would be reduced by at least half making your chances of winning pretty slim. This analogy, with Lebanon as the fighter, illustrates the difficulty of having a competitive economy when a significant portion of the population is inactive in the labor force. Today, in 2015, many countries still struggle with issues relating to the equal representation of women in the workforce. This is demonstrated by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap 2014 report, which estimated that it would take 81 years to completely seal the gap. Lebanon, which ranked 135 out of the 142 countries surveyed in the WEF’s report, is perhaps centuries from closing that gap, with women constituting only about 25 percent of those employed, according to