India dawdling in closing gender gap reveals Gender Gap Index

The World Economic Forum’s global report that measures the size of gaps in inequality between men and women finds that India slow in reducing gender gap.

India dawdling in closing gender gap reveals Gender Gap Index

The World Economic Forum’s global report that measures the size of gaps in inequality between men and women finds that even the best performing nations have reduced the gender gap by only as much as 80%

India and other South Asian nations may be way ahead of global powerhouses such as the United States, Japan and Germany when it comes to the political empowerment of their women but they score poorly overall on the Global Gender Gap Index 2006. The survey, which measures differences between the sexes on indices such as participation of women in the economy and politics, educational attainment and health, says Asia needs to make rapid strides in these areas.

In fact, the Philippines (6) is the only Asian country to figure in the top 10 of the ranking of 115 countries, which rates the Scandinavian countries -- Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland -- and Germany as the countries with the smallest gender gap. While no country in the world has managed to achieve complete gender parity, the top four have closed the gap by about 80%.

The Global Gender Gap Report measures the size of the gender gap in four critical areas of inequality between men and women: economic participation and opportunity -- outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment; educational attainment -- outcomes on access to basic and higher-level education; political empowerment -- outcomes on representation in decision-making structures; health and survival -- outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.

India is placed a low 98 in the ranking of 115 countries prepared by the World Economic Forum, the London School of Economics and Harvard University, the only democracy of some standing to figure so low on the index.

However, it ranks 20th on the sub-index of empowering women politically, with 8% women in parliament and 3% in ministerial posts. And though the US (rank 22) has 15% women in parliament and 14% in ministerial positions, it occupies 66th spot on this sub-index, as, unlike India, the country never had any female leadership in the executive office.

According to the report, India also fares poorly in the economic empowerment of women. It takes the 110th spot, with only Bahrain, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen and Saudi Arabia worse off on this sub-index. While the US has 60% participation of women in the labour force and 55% in the professional and technical workforce, India has 34% and 21%, respectively.

Besides India, other large highly populated nations such as Bangladesh (91), Iran (108) and Pakistan (112) hold some of the lowest positions in the Asian rankings. Their rankings reflect large disparities between men and women on all four areas of the index, although, with the exception of Iran, they all display good performances on political empowerment -- Bangladesh (17), India (20) and Pakistan (37) -- surpassing the United States (66) and Japan (83) on this variable.

The world’s other fastest growing economy, China (63), shows a mediocre performance on economic participation (53), political empowerment (52) and educational attainment (77). But China’s overall score is damaged by its score on the health sub-index. China ranks 114 out of the 115 countries on the health and survival sub-index, in particular due to a disproportionate sex ratio at birth, which contributes to the country’s well-documented ‘missing women’ phenomenon.

The index shows that while the world as a whole is close to eliminating the gap between women and men in their outcomes on education and health, only a little over 50% of the gap on economic participation and opportunity has been closed. Furthermore, taken together, women in the 115 countries covered by the index, representing over 5 billion, or 90% of the world’s population, have only 15% of the political empowerment endowed to men.

Good performances in all four categories account for the Philippines’ high position in the rankings -- economic participation and opportunity (4), educational attainment (1), political empowerment (22), and health and survival (1). In fact, this is the only country in Asia to have closed the gender gap on both education and health, and only among five in the world that have done so (the others are the Dominican Republic, France, Honduras and Lesotho).

The next highest-ranking country from the region is Sri Lanka (13), performing well due to having reached parity on health and being among the top 10 on political empowerment (7). Sri Lanka has been led by a female head of state for 21 of the last 50 years, and has the smallest gap on educational attainment (52) relative to other economies on the Indian subcontinent.

This year marks an important progression in the report’s methodology, with the adoption of a new tool that focuses on the relative size of the gender gap rather than levels of women’s empowerment and access. “The new index assesses countries on how well they are dividing their resources and opportunities among their male and female populations, regardless of the overall levels of these resources and opportunities. Thus, the index does not penalise those countries that have low levels of education overall, but rather those where the distribution of education is uneven between women and men,” said Ricardo Hausmann, one of the report’s authors.

The report also provides some evidence on the link between the gender gap and the economic performance of countries. “Our work shows a strong correlation between GDP per capita and the gender gap scores. While this does not imply causality, the possible theoretical underpinnings of this link are quite simple: countries that do not fully capitalise effectively on one half of their human resources run the risk of undermining their competitive potential. We hope to highlight the economic incentive behind empowering women, in addition to promoting equality as a basic human right,” said Laura Tyson, another author.

The new methodology reveals some unique and interesting insights at the global level. “Our index shows that the world (115 countries) has on average closed over 90% of the gender gap in education and in health. On the other hand, the countries covered have closed only a little over 50% of the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity, and only 15% of the gap in political empowerment,” said Saadia Zahidi.

Interestingly, the Gender Gap Report also throws light on some lesser-known facts about women’s empowerment like the duration of paid maternity leave, maternal mortality rate and access to ‘skilled’ health staff for childbirth.

Source: www.weforum.org