You may have heard this statistic before, but depressingly, it’s still true — despite comprising 50% of the global population, women own just a tiny fraction of the world’s wealth: 1%. Despite most often bearing a greater workload, taking the lion’s share of the responsibility for rearing children, and producing most of the world’s food, women are still shut out of the right to own private property and shunned from taking out loans.

Women around the world are still routinely denied rights granted to men — and that includes the right to own property or even to open bank accounts. The UN Development Program reports:

Six out of ten of the world’s poorest people are women who must, as the primary family caretakers and producers of food, shoulder the burden of tilling land, grinding grain, carrying water and cooking. This is no easy burden. In Kenya, women can burn up to 85 percent of their daily calorie intake just fetching water … Yet some 75 percent of the world’s women cannot get bank loans because they have unpaid or insecure jobs and are not entitled to property ownership.

It’s a crippling statistic. And lest you think we’ve moved into the enlightened age of equal rights, that stat will be sitting right there for years to come — a reminder that there’s still a hell of a long ways to go before we approach anything resembling meaningful gender equality. But there are some very good reasons that a greater emphasis should be placed on giving women access to loans and property, even beyond the fact that gender equality should be viewed globally as a fundamental right. Here’s the UNDP again:

Equality between men and women is more than a matter of social justice – it’s a fundamental human right. But gender equality also makes good economic sense. When women have equal access to education, and go on to participate fully in business and economic decision-making, they are a key driving force against poverty. Women with equal rights are better educated, healthier, and have greater access to land, jobs and financial resources. Their increased earning power in turn raises household incomes.

What’s more, women typically do a better job with investments than men do — women have repay their loans at rates than men.

But regardless whether it’s good for local economies or not, efforts to correct this imbalance must be made — given the sweep of globalization, the fact that women account for such a small slice of the world’s ownership is disgraceful.

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Photo credit: mckaysavage via Flickr/CC BY