NO PROGRESS YET IN GENDER EQUALITY , head of U.N. Women says

A girl born today will be 81 years old before she has the same chance as a man to be CEO of a company, the head of U.N. Women has said, and she will have to wait until she's 50 to have an equal chance to lead a country.

 In fact, twenty years after 189 countries adopted a blueprint to achieve equality for women, not a single country has reached gender parity and equality, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told the Associated Press.

See also: Emma Watson to hold gender equality Q&A for International Women's Day

Meanwhile, if the gender pay gap reduces at the current rate, it will take another 70 years to close, the Guardian reports.

Decades after both the UK and the U.S. passed equal pay legislation, women worldwide earn just 77% of the amount given to men, a number that has grown only three percentage points in 20 years, the paper says, citing a report from the UN's International Labour Organization.

The news comes ahead of International Women's Day on Sunday and next week's meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women.

The commission will review the 150-page platform for action to achieve equality that was adopted at the groundbreaking U.N. women's conference in Beijing in 1995, when then-U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton declared in a keynote speech: "Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights."

While there has been some progress since Beijing, especially in women's health and girls' education, Mlambo-Ngcuka highlighted some important numbers. There are fewer than 20 female heads of state and government, and the number of women lawmakers has increased from 11% to just 22% in the last two decades.

"We just don't have critical mass to say that post-Beijing women have reached a tipping point in their representation," she said.

She said the under-representation of women in decision-making and violence against women are "global phenomena," a result of male domination in the world that needs to change if women are ever to be truly equal.

The Beijing platform called for governments to end discrimination against women and close the gender gap in 12 critical areas including health, education, employment, political participation and human rights.

It recognized that women have the right to control their own sexuality without coercion, and reaffirmed their right to decide whether and when to have children.