News: India has ranked 131 out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, slipping two places from its position last year.
About Global Gender Gap Index
- It annually benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions (sub-indexes):
- Economic Participation and Opportunity
- Educational Attainment
- Health and Survival
- Political Empowerment.
- Launched in: 2006
- Feature: It is the longest-standing index tracking the progress of numerous countries’ efforts towards closing these gaps over time.
Global Gender Gap Index, 2025 (19th edition) and India
- India ranked 131st in global gender parity out of 148 countries, with a score of 64.4%, down three positions from the previous year.
- Comparisons with neighbours: India is behind its neighbours – Bhutan (119th), Nepal (125th) and Sri Lanka (130th).
- Economic Participation and Opportunity: India saw an improvement in economic participation and opportunity.
- The score rose to 40.7% (improved by +.9 percentage points), supported by an increase in estimated earned income from 28.6% to 29.9%, while labour-force participation remained steady at 45.9%.
- Educational Attainment: India scored 1%, reflecting gains in female literacy and tertiary education enrolment.
- Health and survival: This also improved due to a better sex ratio at birth and increased healthy life expectancy.
- Political empowerment: This sub-index declined, with women’s representation in parliament dropping from 14.7% to 13.8%.
Global highlights of the Report
- Leaders: Iceland leads the rankings for the 16th year running, followed by Finland, Norway, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
- The global gender gap has closed to 68.8%, marking the strongest annual advancement since the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The progress made in this edition was driven primarily by significant strides in political empowerment and economic participation while educational attainment and health and survival maintained near-parity levels above 95%.
- However, despite women representing 41.2% of the global workforce, a stark leadership gap persists with women holding only 28.8% of top leadership positions.
