Global Gender Gap report
World Economic Forum released the 18th edition of its annual Global Gender Gap Report for 2024, comprehensively benchmarking gender parity across 146 economies worldwide.
It benchmarks countries on their progress towards gender parity in four Key dimensions with Submatrices.
It is the longest-standing index, which tracks progress towards closing these gaps over time since its inception in 2006.
Iceland maintains its number 1 rank (93.5%), and is also the only economy to have closed over 90% of its gender gap
India’s rank
India has slipped two places to 129 out of 146 countries.
Last year, it was ranked 127, after having jumped eight places from 135 in 2022.
India has closed 64.1% of its gender gap in 2024, the report noted, leaving policy-makers with a huge window of opportunity to do better.
Need for India to address and close the gender gap in education and politics
In India, the “slight regression,” according to the report, is mainly due to “small declines” in the spheres of education and political empowerment.
With a population of over 140 crore, even two steps back mean staggering numbers.
Though India, it pointed out, had shown a slight improvement in economic participation and opportunity for the last few years, it would need 6.2 percentage points more to match its 2012 score of 46%.
One way of achieving the objective will be through bridging gender gaps in, the labour force participation rate (45.9%).
To do that, a slew of measures must be in place, from ensuring that girls do not drop out of higher education, providing them job skills, ensuring safety at the workplace, and helping them keep a job after marriage by sharing responsibility for chores at home.
In education, the gap between men and women’s literacy rate is 17.2 percentage points wide, leaving India ranked 124th on this indicator.
India has fared better in the political empowerment index, but women’s representation in Parliament continues to be low
The newly elected Lok Sabha have close to 800 women contestants were in the fray, but the number of women Members of Parliament has dipped to 74 from 78 (2019) of 543 members, which is 13.6% of the total.
These numbers are not a good sign in the backdrop of the Women’s Reservation Bill, 2023, yet to come into effect, which aims to reserve one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and State legislative Assemblies for women.
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