Workplace inequality is not expected to be eliminated until the year 2276, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The organization said the worldwide gender gap in the workplace has widened since last year, when gender parity was predicted to be only 202 years off.  

While there has been a rise in the share of women among skilled workers and senior officials there were "stagnating or reversing gaps in labor market participation and monetary rewards," the authors wrote.

The report said that, on average, only 55 percent of adult women are in today's active labor market, compared with 78 percent for men, while women globally on average still make 40 percent less than men for similar work in similar positions. 

Although wage gap has been decreasing in OECD countries throughout the past ten years,  it has expanded in emerging and developing economies. 

Saadia Zahidi, managing director of the World Economic Forum, told CGTN that the best way to address the issue is to look at careers which are likely to flourish in the future to ensure the next generations do not face the same challenge as their predecessors.

"The one thing that I would focus on for closing gender gaps in the future is actually focusing on the professions of the future. We now have very good data and understanding of which are the professions that'll be growing in the future and which will be the professions that will be declining," she said.

"We don't need to wait until we have further gender gaps and then put in place corrective measures, we can actually start embedding and hard-wiring gender equality today into the roles that will be growing in the future. 

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math-related work, including cloud-computing, artificial intelligence, engineering are areas that she highlighted.

"In addition to that, there are a number of growing roles of the future, when it comes to education or the care economy that actually already have a comparative advantage for women but we need to ensure that we're making it into leadership positions so focusing on the roles of the future would be my big bet on gender equality," she said.

The WEF report logs disparities between the sexes across 153 countries, covering four areas which include education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment. 

In general, the gender gap across these categories has shrunk, and the WEF has now forecast that it will take 99.5 years for women to achieve parity on average, down from the 108 years calculated last year. 

But other areas are still far behind.

General parity "will take more than a lifetime to achieve," the WEF said.

The WEF said that the gender gap was more than 96 percent closed in the area of education and could be eliminated altogether within just 12 years. The gap was also small in the health and survival category but the WEF report said the length of time that it would take to achieve full equality in this area is not yet certain due to persisting gender issues that remain in large and populous countries like China and India. 

Politics, which generally has lagged behind other fields, showed the biggest improvement in the past year. 

In 2019, women held 25.2 percent of parliamentary lower-house and 22.1 percent of ministerial positions, compared to 24.1 percent and 19 percent in 2018. 

Gender equality progress varies across many different countries. 

The report said that despite the fact that Western European countries could close their overall gender gap in 54.4 years, countries in the Middle East and North Africa could take up to 140 years. 

Overall, the Nordic countries had the highest levels of gender equality. Men and women were most equal in Iceland, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden. 

Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen showed the biggest overall gender gaps of all countries. 

Out of all of the world's 20 leading economies, Germany fared the best, taking 10th place. France was at 15th, South Africa at 17th, Canada at 19th and Britain at 21st. 

The United States continued to fall in the ranks, slipping two places to 53rd. The report said "American women still struggle to enter the very top business positions" as well as being "under-represented in political leadership roles."