Australia is narrowing the economic equality gap between men and women, but an annual report on the equality gap concludes it will take at least a century for the world to close the gender gap.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2017 ranked Australia as 35th for overall equality.  That's better than last year's report, that put Oz in 46th place.  Iceland tops the list with a 12 percent gender gap across all the WEF's measures; Norway, Finland and Sweden are all in the top five.

But across the globe, the average situation for women got worse in the past year, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.  It's the first time that has happened since the WEF began charting the gap in 2006.  Ranking 144 countries by economic opportunities, education, political participation and health, the report found that women have 68 percent of the chances and outcomes that men have.  That's down 0.3 percent from the previous year.

At the current rate, the report says it will take 100 years to close the global gender gap.  Just a year ago, that was 83 years.  The figures suggest that Women will have to wait 217 years before they earn as much as men and are equally represented in the workplace.