About
- The Index was first introduced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2006 as a framework for capturing the magnitude of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress over time. It is published annually since then i.e. 2006. This year’s report benchmarks 149 countries on their progress towards gender parity on a scale from 0 (disparity) to 1 (parity) across four thematic dimensions: -
- the sub-indexes Economic Participation and Opportunity,
- Educational Attainment,
- Health and Survival, and
- Political Empowerment
and provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across and within regions and income groups. This year’s edition is 13th as such.
Key Findings
- The average distance completed to parity is at 68.0%, which is a marginal improvement over last year.
- Across the four sub-indices, the largest gender parity is observed in political empowerment which maintains a gap of 77.1%.
- Economic participation and opportunity gap have slightly reduced since last year.
- Among 149 countries there are only 17 that have women as heads of states while on average 18% of ministers and24% of parliamentarians globally are women.
- Women have as much access to financial services as men in just 60% of countries and to land ownership in just 42% of countries.
- There are still 44 countries where over 20% of women are illiterate. Presently on average, 65% of girls and 66% of boys have enrolled in secondary education, and just 39% of women and 34% of men are in college or university.
- Top 5 performing countries
- 1. Iceland (Score 0.858)
- 2. Norway (0.835)
- 3. Sweden (0.822)
- 4. Finland (0.821)
- 5. Nicaragua (0.809)
- Bottom 5 performing countries
- Chad (0.580)
- Syria (0.568)
- Iraq (0.551)
- Pakistan (0.550)
- Yemen (0.499)
- Regionwise Western Europe has performed the best followed by North America, while the Middle East and North Africa are the worst performers.
India's Performance
- India has ranked at 108 out of 149 countries.
- It has recorded improvement in wage equality for similar work and fully closed its tertiary education gender gap for the first time and kept primary and secondary education gaps closed for the third year.
- It ranks 142nd out of 149 countries in the economic opportunity and participation sub-index.
- It also continues to rank third lowest in the world on Health and Survival, remaining the world’s least improved country on this sub-index over the past decade.
