WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report

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Recently, the World Economic Forum released the Global Gender Gap Report 2021.

Key Findings of the report

• Globally
• • The countries with the largest gender gaps in economic participation include Iran, India, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
  • The gender gap in political empowerment remains the largest: women represent only 26.1 percent of some 35,500 parliament seats and just 22.6 percent of over 3,400 ministers worldwide.
  • Bangladesh is “the only country where more women have held head-of-state positions than men in the past 50 years,”
  • South Asia incidentally is one of the worst-performing regions, followed only by the Middle East and northern Africa.
  • China and India together account for about 90 to 95 per cent of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million missing female births annually worldwide due to gender-biased prenatal sex-selective practices.
•  Indian Scenario
  • India has declined on the political empowerment index as well by 13.5 percentage points, and a decline in the number of women ministers, from 23.1 per cent in 2019 to 9.1 per cent in 2021.
  • India has closed 62.5 percent of its gender gap to date.
  • It has still performed relatively well compared to other countries, ranking at 51 in women’s participation in politics.
  • In the index of education attainment, India has been ranked at 114.
  • The two indices where India has fared the worst are “Health and Survival”, which includes the sex ratio, and economic participation of women.
    • India has fared the worst, ranking at 155 — the only country to have fared worse is China.
    • The report points to a skewed sex ratio as a major factor.
  • The economic participation gender gap actually widened in India by 3 per cent this year.
  • The estimated earned income of women in India is only one-fifth of men’s, which puts the country among the bottom 10 globally on this indicator.

Source :IE