Polity & Governance

Gender Gap Report 2023

Table of Contents

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.
Highlights of the Report:
  • 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.
Significance of the report:
  • 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.
Concerns highlighted:
  • 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.
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