Global Gender Gap Index

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

The Global Gender Gap Index for 2022 was released by the World Economic Forum.

Global Gender Gap Index

• It benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions
• Economic Participation and Opportunity,
• Educational Attainment,
• Health and Survival, and
• Political Empowerment
• On each of the four sub-indices as well as on the overall index the GGG index provides scores between 0 and 1, where 1 shows full gender parity and 0 is complete imparity.
• The cross-country comparisons aim to support the identification of the most effective policies to close gender gaps

Ranking

• Although no country achieved full gender parity, the top 10 economies closed at least 80% of their gender gaps, with Iceland (90.8%) leading the global ranking.
• Iceland is followed by Finland (86%, 2nd), Norway (84.5%, 3rd), New Zealand (84.1%, 4th), Sweden (82.2%, 5th), Rwanda (81.1%, 6th), Nicaragua (81%, 7th), Namibia (80.7%, 8th), Ireland (80.4%, 9th) and Germany (80.1%, 10th).
• India was ranked at 135 out of 146 countries

India’s Performance

• India has approximately 662 million (or 66.2 crore) women.
• In 2022, India’s overall score has improved from 0.625 (in 2021) to 0.629.
• India’s score of 0.629 is its seventh-highest score in the last 16 years.
• India ranked poorly among its neighbours and is behind Bangladesh (71), Nepal (96), Sri Lanka (110), Maldives (117) and Bhutan (126).
• Only Iran (143), Pakistan (145) and Afghanistan (146) perform worse than India in south Asia.

How India stands on different sub-indices:

Political Empowerment

• This includes metrics such as the percentage of women in Parliament, the percentage of women in ministerial positions etc.
• Of all the sub-indices, this is where India ranks the highest (48th out of 146).

Economic Participation and Opportunity

• This includes metrics such as the percentage of women who are part of the labour force, wage equality for similar work, earned income etc
• India ranks a lowly 143 out of the 146 countries in contention even though its score has improved over 2021 from 0.326 to 0.350.

Educational Attainment

• This sub-index includes metrics such as literacy rate and the enrolment rates in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Here India ranks 107th out of 146.

Health and Survival

• This includes two metrics: the sex ratio at birth and healthy life expectancy. In this metric, India is ranked the last (146) among all the countries.