The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 was recently released by the World Economic Forum.
What is the report on?
The report maps the performance of different countries on an index that evaluates the parity among men and women.
Gender gap is measured across four key pillars -
economic opportunity
political empowerment
educational attainment
health and survival
What are the highlights?
India has been ranked 108th in World Economic Forum (WEF) gender gap index, same as 2017.
Growth - Being in 72nd place, India recorded improvement in wage equality for similar work.
It has also closed its tertiary education enrolment gender gap for the first time in 2018.
It has managed to keep its primary and secondary gaps closed for the third year running.
India is also one of the countries that has done well on the political empowerment of women, ranking 20th.
Shortfalls - Gender gaps have worsened for India in 2 categories - health and survival, economic participation and opportunity.
India ranks 142nd out of 149 countries in the economic opportunity and participation subindex.
India needs to make improvements ranging from women’s participation to getting more women into senior and professional roles.
India continues to rank third-lowest in the world on health and survival.
It remains the world’s least-improved country on this subindex over the past decade.
In fact, India actually widens the gender gap on this subindex this year.
India has the second-largest artificial intelligence (AI) workforce, but it has one of the largest AI gender gaps, with only 22% of roles filled by women.
What is the global scenario?
The global list was topped by Iceland, having closed more than 85% of its overall gender gap.
Iceland holds the top spot in the index for the 10th consecutive year.
Nordic countries dominated the top slots with Norway, Sweden and Finland in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th places respectively.
Other countries in the top-10 include Nicaragua, Rwanda, New Zealand, the Philippines, Ireland and Namibia.
South Asia was the second-lowest ranking region in the index, with only 65% of its gender gap now closed.
India is slightly ahead of the regional average having closed 66% gap.
Overall, the world has closed 68% of its gender gap i.e. there is still a 32% average gender gap that remains to be closed.
But this gender gap extends to over 77% when it comes to political empowerment and over 44% in relation to economic participation.
At the current rate of change, the world will take 108 years to close the overall gender gap.
Also, it would take 202 years to bring about parity in the workplace.
What does it imply?
Overall, political empowerment and economic participation are the two categories with maximum divergence in gender parity scores.
The economies that will succeed in the fourth industrial revolution will be those that are best able to harness all their available talent.
So proactive measures that support gender parity and social inclusion and address historical imbalances are therefore essential.
