World economic forum (WEF) 2018 Global gender gap report:
Since 2006, World Economic Forum is publishing a report on global gender gap every year. Last year’s report created a ripple across the Globe as for the first time since it was introduced, Global Gender Gap index showed a reversal in phase.
This year the report benchmarks 149 countries on their progress towards gender parity on a scale from 0 (imparity) to 1 (parity) across four thematic dimensions—
Economic Participation and Opportunity,
Educational Attainment
Health and Survival, and
Political Empowerment
and provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across regions and income groups. The rankings are designed to create global awareness of the challenges posed by gender gaps, and the opportunities created by reducing them.
WEF uses factors based on outcome rather than the inputs like policies or measures in place. Hence, the result in a way can be imperative for the government or such bodies in assessing the initiatives that are being taken to reduce gender gap. Also, the method actually measures the Gender gap and not the women empowerment, so women out performing men in countries is equivalent to women and men performing equal in other countries.
The progress towards gender parity is very slow, globally. Out of the 144 covered both this year and last year, 89 countries have at least marginally closed their gender gap and 55 have regressed.
Region wise Western Europe has the highest level of Gender parity, followed by North America and Latin America at second and third place.
Lets see how our country has fared, how it has performed this year.
As we search for the score card of India, just above it we can find the top performer in Gender equality, Iceland is ranked number one.
India is ranked 108th out of 149 countries this year, which is same as previous year, with a score slightly less than previous year.
Also, in all four areas, India’s rank actually deteriorates although overall ranking remains same.
Our neighbor Bangladesh is the top performer in the region in 48th rank. In the region out of seven countries India ranks fourth below Bangladesh SriLanka and Nepal.
India succeeds in fully closing its tertiary education gender gap for the first time, and keeps primary and secondary education gaps closed for the third year running.
But in health and survival, it remains world’s least improved country (ranks 147 of 149 countries)for over a decade now.
India does comparatively well in political empowerment (ranks 19), which is major contributor of the score.
Low score comes from economic participation and opportunity (ranks 142 out of 149), which has gone down further from not only last year but few notches down from 2006. The imparity in labor force participation (138) and income (138) both are great and so are technical and professional workers (133) and senior officials and managers (130).
To summarize, economic participation which directly effects GDP of the country, will take a long time to achieve gender gap.
As per conclusion from the report goes, Projecting current trends into the future, the overall global gender gap will close in 108 years across the 106 countries covered since 2006. The most challenging gender gaps to close are
the economic and political empowerment dimensions,
which will take 202 and 107 years to close respectively.
Source: The global gender gap report 2018: World Economic Forum