In her 27th novel, The Cleft, ­Nobel-prize winning author Doris Lessing described a prehistoric race of semi-aquatic proto-­humans. These pre-­humans live in a world without males. Theirs is an idyllic utopia where females rule peacefully – until the first males are born.

Lessing claims the book was inspired by a scientific article, proposing that “the basic and primal human stock was probably female”. However, this fictional gynocratic golden age remains just that: a work of fiction.

The Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) seeks to measure gender disparities across four key areas: health, education, economy and politics. The recently published 2015 report suggests that things are still heavily skewed in favour of men. The measurement of equality is presented as a percentage, where 100 per cent equals total parity.

The closest women get to parity is in the domain of health and survival, with a score of 96 per cent. The area of greatest disparity is political empowerment, where the score is only 23 per cent. Globally, only 22 women hold their nation’s highest political office. This is 22 out of 315, around 7 per cent.

Outside of politics the leadership disparity is often far greater. Female CEOs are ridiculously rare, and it seems that the bigger the company is the scarcer they become. Across the European Union, only 2 per cent of the largest public companies have female CEOs.

Even if we ignore top jobs, such as CEO or director, women are still widely underrepresented in management. According to data from the International Labour Organisation statistical office, there are only three countries on Earth where your boss is more likely to be a woman than a man: Jamaica, St Lucia and Colombia. Out of 108 nations surveyed, only these three scored above 50 per cent for female managers. Jamaica took the top spot, with 59.3 per cent. The UAE was much further down the list, with an estimated 10 per cent.

What accentuates these disparities for me is that, in many nations, women greatly outperform men in education. In the Gulf region this is unequivocally so. Using either grade point averages or specific course grades as indicators of performance, virtually all of the published studies report women outperforming men.

A study at UAE University found that female undergraduates in the college of business and economics significantly outperformed their male counterparts. Similarly, at the Arab Open University in Kuwait, the data suggest that female students outperform males across all subjects. If we accept that education is, in part, about preparing the future workforce, then why do the classroom’s star performers so often fail to make it to the boardroom?

Even within the meritocratic halls of academia we can glimpse this gender bias. A recent study by Heather Sarsons, a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University, explored 500 tenure decisions across 30 top schools. Tenure is the decision as to whether to offer a junior professor a permanent spot on the faculty. This decision is influenced by how productive the professor has been in terms of publishing research.

The Harvard study found that when a female professor had co-authored her research publications, she was less likely to be awarded tenure than a male colleague with the same number of co-authored publications. In the cases where male and female candidates had solo-authored all their publications, tenure decision rates were about equal. One interpretation of these findings is that when women work with men, the men are given the lion’s share of the credit.

One positive in the WEF’s gender report however, was that, in most nations, the gap is closing. Based on their calculations and projections, the WEF has developed an app that enables you to calculate how old you will be when your country finally arrives at gender equality. For a 25-year-old Emirati woman the magic date is 2134, around the time of her 143rd birthday.

Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States