India ranks 108th in WEF gender gap index 2018

India ranks 108th in WEF gender gap index 2018

News:

India ranked 108th in World Economic Forum (WEF) Gender Gap Index, same as 2017.

Facts:

• India fell 21 places on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index to 108 which is far below the global average and much behind its neighbors China and Bangladesh
• In Global Gender Gap Report 2018, India ranks 142nd out of 149 countries in the economic opportunity and participation subindex

Finding of World Economic Forum Report

• In 2016, India’s rank was 87. In 2006, when the World Economic Forum started measuring gender gap across the world, India’s rank was 10 notches higher than it is in 2017.
• India needs to make improvements across the board, from women’s participation to getting more women into senior and professional roles

Where India lost out

• India’s greatest challenges were in the economic participation and opportunities for women
• 66% of women’s work in India is unpaid, compared to 12% of men’s.
• India did not perform too well in the health and survival pillar either, where it is ranked 141 – the fourth-lowest in the world.
• The report said gender gaps in political empowerment, life expectancy and basic literacy also caused India’s rank to slip

Positive Side

• India has slightly improved in WEF’s wage equality for similar work indicator, where it stood at 72nd place.
• The country has also closed its tertiary education enrolment gap for the first time in 2018 and has managed to keep its primary and secondary gaps closed for the third year running.
• India has the second-largest artificial intelligence (AI) workforce but one of the largest AI gender gaps, with only 22 percent of roles filled by women.
• India fully closed the gap in primary and secondary education enrolment for the second year in a row.

Around the world

• The global gender gap widened this year, for the first time since the World Economic Forum’s index started
• At the top of the Global Gender Gap Index is Iceland. The country has closed nearly 88% of its gap. It has been the world’s most gender-equal country for nine years

Additional Facts:

About The Global Gender Gap

• Introduced by the World Economic Forum to examine 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.
• In addition, this year’s edition studies skills gender gaps related to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Gender Inequality Index of UNDP

• It measures gender inequalities in three important aspects of human development—
• Reproductive health – measured by maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rates
• Empowerment – Measured by proportion of parliamentary seats occupied by females and proportion of adult females and males aged 25 years and older with at least some secondary education
• Economic status – expressed as labour market participation and measured by labour force participation rate of female and male populations aged 15 years and older.
• Thus the higher the GII value the more disparities between females and males and the more loss to human development.