Context:
India ranks 135 among a total of 146 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index, 2022, released by the World Economic Forum. The country is the worst performer in the world in the “health and survival” sub-index in which it is ranked 146.
Relevance:
GS-II: Social Justice (Women Empowerment, Governance and Government Policies, Issues Arising Out of Design & Implementation of Policies), GS-II: International Relations (Important International Institutions and their Reports) GS-I: Indian Society (Issues related to Women, Gender Inequality)
Dimensions of the Article:
- About the Global Gender Gap Report
- About World Economic Forum (WEF)
- Highlights of the Global Gender Gap report 2021
About the Global Gender Gap Report
- The Global Gender Gap Report is published by the World Economic Forum and The Global Gender Gap Index is an index designed to measure gender equality.
- The index is designed to “measure gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities in countries rather than the actual levels of the available resources and opportunities in those countries.” Therefore, it is not necessarily true that highly developed countries should have higher scores.
- The methodology used to determine index scores is designed in such a way as to count situations in which men are disadvantaged relative to women as “equal”. (Gender imbalances to the advantage of women do not affect the score.). Over the Index, the highest possible score is 1 (equality) and the lowest possible score is 0 (inequality) – To put it more simply: women could be better off in all areas and still the index would deem that country perfectly equal.
The report’s Gender Gap Index ranks countries according to calculated gender gap between women and men in four key areas to gauge the state of gender equality in a country:
- Economic participation and opportunity,
- Educational attainment,
- Health and survival,
- Political empowerment.
About World Economic Forum (WEF)
- The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.
- It was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests.
- The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance.
Major reports published by WEF:
- Energy Transition Index.
- Global Competitiveness Report.
- Global IT Report (WEF along with INSEAD, and Cornell University)
- Global Gender Gap Report.
- Global Risk Report.
- Global Travel and Tourism Report.
Highlights of the Global Gender Gap report 2022
- The Global Gender Report, 2022, which includes the index, says it will now take 132 years to reach gender parity, with the gap reducing only by four years since 2021 and the gender gap closed by 68.1%.
- But this does not compensate for the generational loss between 2020 and 2021 as the trends leading up to 2020 showed that the gender gap was set to close within 100 years.
- India ranks poorly among its neighbours and is behind Bangladesh (71), Nepal (96), Sri Lanka (110), Maldives (117) and Bhutan (126).
- Only the performance of Iran (143), Pakistan (145) and Afghanistan (146) was worse than India in South Asia. In 2021, India ranked 140 out of 156 nations.
- It measures scores on a 0-to-100 scale, which can be interpreted as the distance covered towards parity or the percentage of the gender gap that has been closed.
- India ranks 146 in health and survival, 143 in economic participation and opportunity, 107 in educational attainment and 48 in political empowerment.
- The report notes that India’s score of 0.629 was its seventh-highest score in the past 16 years.
- India also “recovered” ground since 2021 in economic participation and opportunity, though the report goes on to add that the labour force participation shrunk for both men (by -9.5 percentage points) and women (-3 percentage points).
– Source: The Hindu
