The Global Gender Gap Report

The Global Gender Gap Index was first introduced by the World Economic Forum in 2006 as a framework for capturing the magnitude of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress over time. The Index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, education, health and political criteria, 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. The methodology and quantitative analysis behind the rankings are intended to serve as a basis for designing effective measures for reducing gender gaps.

            In addition, on average in the Report covered the 144 countries have closed 96% of the gap in health outcomes between women and men, unchanged since last year, and more than 95% of the gap in educational attainment, a slight decrease compared to last year.

However, the gaps between women and men on economic participation and political empowerment remain wide: only 58% of the economic participation gap has been closed—a second consecutive year of reversed progress and the lowest value measured by the Index since 2008—and about 23% of the political gap, unchanged since last year against a long-term trend of slow but steady improvement.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) published its annual report on the global gender gap across a range of different dimensions. The purpose of this global gender gap report is for countries to assess whether they are making progress towards reducing the gender gap in health and survival, economic opportunities, education and political empowerment.

India for the first time has nearly closed its tertiary education gender gap and succeeds in fully closing its primary and secondary education enrolment gender gaps for the second year running. In addition, it continues to rank fourth-lowest in the world on Health and Survival, remaining the world’s least-improved country on this subindex over the past decade.

For nine continuous years, Iceland is on the top, for being the country that most equitably distributes resources between men and women. India ranks at 108 overall while in South Asia, India ranks 3rd, well behind Bangladesh, which despite being a poorer country, has a rank of 47 and also behind Maldives (106).

In the table 3, India’s scores on specific indicators within each dimension. Across all indicators, the country scores way below the average scores in the report. For some indicators like sex ratio at birth, life expectancy, labour force participation and estimated earned income, the results are particularly poor.

India’s ranking on health and survival is the worst and we are in the bottom 3 at 141 because of our continued skewed sex ratio as well as poor indicators of maternal health including ante-natal care. There are 33 countries in the list which have reached parity for health and survival of which several of them are from Latin American countries.

For this particular index, only China and Azerbaijan do worse than us, the former because of decades of sex-selective abortions, which were worsened due to China’s one-child policy and the latter because of large gaps in life expectancy between men and women.

For economic opportunity, it rank at 139. There are just four countries which is Iran, Pakistan, Yemen and Syria which fare worse. As the table indicates, 6.5 times, more young women are not in education or employment when compared to young men.

The existence of non-discriminatory laws, women constitute just 11% of the boards of publicly traded companies and form under 15% of the staff in Research and Development roles. Moreover, laws alone are inadequate in instituting reforms unless they are followed by concerted efforts on the parts of organizations to hire more women all across the board and especially in top leadership positions.

This is the fact that 65.6% of the work done by women in India is unpaid work in contrast to just 11.7% for men. Also, less than 43% of women have an account in a financial institution, almost 20% less than that of men. This figure for women is also likely to be much lower in the rural areas where financial inclusion for women in formal institutions is a serious problem.

For educational attainment, it fare slightly better at 112, having closed the gap in enrolment in primary and secondary education across most states in India. Further, as a country, India is slowly closing the gap in tertiary (higher) education.

While in many countries we see a gender difference in science graduation rates, this is not the case in India because15% of both men and women graduate with degrees in the Natural Sciences, perhaps the only sliver of good news in this report.

In conclusion, women are over-represented in the Social Sciences, Journalism and Education and underrepresented in Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction subjects. According to the WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2017, on an average 66% of women’s work in India is unpaid, compared to 12% of men’s. In case of China, 44% of women’s work is unpaid, while for men the figure stood at 19%.