During the event, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who chairs the two-day summit from Friday, received reports on activities and recommendations on the issue from groups such as a U.N. entity dedicated to gender equality and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Abe said the G-20 will establish a follow-up system to review at the leaders' level the steps taken by members to achieve a goal agreed in 2014 of reducing the gender gap in labor force participation by 25 percent by 2025.
The special event, which was opened to the media and featured Dutch Queen Maxima as a guest, was held to add momentum to women's empowerment, seen as essential for achieving sustainable economic growth, according to the Japanese government. A report submitted to Abe by the OECD and the International Labor Organization said "further progress" was seen in most G-20 economies toward meeting the 25 percent target, but there remain large country differences in the labor force participation of women and, consequently, in the gender gap in participation. The report said particularly large gender gap reductions occurred in Argentina, Brazil, South Korea and Japan, where Abe has been pushing his "womenomics" policy that focuses on enhancing women's role in the economy. In Japan, the share of the population aged 15-64 participating in the labor force by gender was about 70 percent for women and nearly 90 percent for men in 2018, according to the report. But Japan ranked the lowest among members of the G-20 major economies in a 2018 global ranking on representation of women in parliament, coming 165th among 193 countries, according to a different report by an international organization that was announced in March. Among the G-20 leaders who gathered in western Japan, only two were women -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May.
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