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India has slipped four places to the 112th rank globally in terms of gender gap amid widening disparity in terms of women’s health and survival and economic participation – the two areas where the country is now ranked in the bottom-five, an annual survey showed on Tuesday, 17 December.
While Iceland remains the world’s most gender-neutral country, India has moved down the ladder from its 108th position last year on the World Economic Forum’s gender gap report to rank below countries like China (106th), Sri Lanka (102nd), Nepal (101st), Brazil (92nd), Indonesia (85th) and Bangladesh (50th).
Yemen is ranked the worst (153rd), while Iraq is 152nd and Pakistan 151st.
Geneva-based WEF, an international organisation for public-private cooperation, said this year’s improvement can largely be ascribed to a significant increase in the number of women in politics.
However, the economic opportunity gap has worsened, widening to 257 years, compared to 202 years last year. The report said one of the greatest challenges to closing this gap is women’s under-representation in emerging roles, such as cloud computing, engineering and data and AI.
Since then, India’s rank has worsened on three of four metrics used for the overall ranking. While India has improved to 18th place on political empowerment, it has slipped to 150th on health and survival, to 149th in terms of economic participation and opportunity and to 112th place for educational attainment.
It also named India among countries with very low women representation on company boards (13.8 percent), while it was even worse in China (9.7 percent).
On health and survival, four large countries – Pakistan, India, Vietnam and China – fare badly with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men, the WEF said.
It also flagged abnormally low sex ratios at birth in India (91 girls for every 100 boys) and Pakistan (92/100).
The WEF said India has closed two-thirds of its overall gender gap, but the condition of women in large fringes of India’s society is precarious and the economic gender gap runs particularly deep.
Since 2006, the gap has significantly widened and India is the only country among the 153 countries studied where the economic gender gap is larger than the political one.
Only one-quarter of women, compared with 82 percent of men, engage actively in the labour market – one of the lowest rates globally (145th).
Women account for only 14 percent of leadership roles (136th) and 30 percent of professional and technical workers.
India ranks high on the political empowerment sub-index, largely because the country was headed by a woman for 20 of the past 50 years. But, female political representation today is low as women make up only 14.4 percent of Parliament (122nd rank globally) and 23 percent of the cabinet (69th), the report said.
Nordic countries continue to lead the way to gender parity and Iceland is followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden in the top-four. In the top-10, they are followed by Nicaragua, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Rwanda and Germany.
The WEF said one positive development is the possibility that a ‘role model effect’ may be starting to have an impact in terms of leadership and possibly also wages.
The issue of the gender gap is likely to be among key focus areas for discussion next month at the annual meeting of the WEF in Davos, Switzerland.
The WEF said it is has committed to at least double the current percentage of women participants at the Davos summit by 2030.
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