Context
The World economic Forum (WEF) released the annual Gender Gap Report 2023.About the report:
- The “Global Gender Gap Report 2023″, assesses equality across various sectors.
- The WEF’s Gender Gap Index measures gender parity in 146 countries and across four areas:
- Economic participation and opportunity,
- Educational attainment,
- Health and survival and
- Political empowerment.
- Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world for the 14th consecutive year and the only one to have closed more than 90% of its gender gap.
- The Southern Asian region has achieved 63.4% gender parity, the second-lowest of the eight regions.
- The overall gender gap closed by a mere 0.3 percent compared to the previous year in all parameters.
- For India:
- India had improved by 4 percentage points and eight positions since the last edition, marking a partial recovery towards its 2020 parity level.
- India had closed 3% of the overall gender gap
- It also underlined that India had reached only 7 % parity on economic participation and opportunity.
- In terms of health and survival, India saw improvement with a 9 percentage point increase in the sex ratio at birth, reaching 92.7 percent parity.
- On the political terms, India registered 3 percent gender parity, with women representing 15.1 percent of parliamentarians, marking the highest representation since the inaugural 2006 edition of the report.
- Position of India’s Neighbours:
- Pakistan -142,
- Bangladesh at 59,
- China at 107,
- Nepal at 116,
- Sri Lanka at 115 and
- Bhutan at 103.
- Other Parameters:
- Participation in governance: Since 2017, 18 countries — including Bolivia (50.4%), India (44.4%) and France (42.3 %) — have achieved women’s representation of over 40% in local governance.
- Skewed sex ratio: for Vietnam, Azerbaijan, India and China, they have relatively low overall rankings on the Health and Survival sub-index is explained by skewed sex ratios at birth.
- India had made significant progress in promoting gender equality and this score is a remarkable improvement compared to the South Asian region’s average value of 0.508 and is close to the world average.
- The report has noted that women worldwide may have to wait for another 131 years to achieve gender parity with men.
- This estimation means that gender equality may not be fully realised until the year 2154.