Bangladesh has been ranked 48 in the WEF Gender Gap report, while India stands at 108.
New Delhi: India has been ranked 60 slots below Bangladesh in this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) Gender Gap report, left behind by two other South Asian counterparts as well.
In the survey of 149 countries, India comes in at 108. The country’s rank was the same in 2017, while it was 21 notches higher, at 87, in 2016. The surveys for both these years involved 144 countries.
Last year, the report explained India’s drop in ranking as “largely attributable to a widening of its gender gaps in political empowerment as well as in healthy life expectancy and basic literacy”.
Within South Asia, Bangladesh is the top performer, with a rank of 48. It was also ranked as the region’s gender parity leader in 2017, though at a notch higher (47).
Sri Lanka and Nepal follow, with ranks of 100 and 105, respectively. Bhutan was ranked 122, and the Maldives 113. Afghanistan was not part of the survey.
Pakistan is the second-worst performer the world over, and the worst in south Asia, with a rank of 148. Yemen, caught in a civil war, is the worst.
Iceland maintains its number one ranking for the 10th time in a row. Norway comes second, and Sweden third.
For a closer study
According to the WEF report, the world has managed to close 68 per cent of its gender gap.
India is two percentage points below the world average, at 66 per cent, and a point above South Asia, which clocked 65 per cent.
The report’s findings are based on a country’s performance across four broad categories: Women’s economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment.
The survey measures gender gaps in access to resources and opportunities, rather than focusing on the resources available. This way, it seeks to ensure higher levels of development are not conflated with levels of gender equality. In other words, a fast developing nation like India can still lag when it comes to gender disparities.
Also read:Bangladesh is better off than India, not a poor, backward neighbour anymore
Fall on four parameters
Although the country’s performance was the same as last year’s overall, it slipped on each of the four sub-indices.
When it comes to economic participation and opportunity, India has dropped three slots, to 142 from 139 in 2017.
This index measures the difference between men and women vis-vis workforce participation, wages and remuneration, as well as advancement in their respective fields.
This year, sandwiched between Morocco and Iran, India is only two steps ahead of Saudi Arabia, which takes the 145th place. Iraq came in last, with a ranking of 149.
On the health and survival index — which seeks to estimate the number of “missing women”, that is, deficit of women arising from cultural biases — India has been ranked the third lowest, at 147. The index covers sex ratio at birth and the life expectancy of men and women.
India may have moved down only one notch from last year’s 146, but, according to the report, this widened gender gap makes it “the world’s least-improved country on this subindex over the past decade”.
Although India maintains its place in the top 20 countries in political empowerment, it hangs on by a thin sliver with a rank of 19. Last year, India was at a more comfortable 15.
Last year’s report had warned, “Maintaining its global top 20 ranking on the political empowerment subindex will require India to make progress on this dimension with a new generation of female political leadership.”
Under education attainment, India ranks 114. Last year, India came in at 112.
However, despite the slip, India “records improvements in wage equality for similar work, succeeds in fully closing its tertiary education gender gap for the first time, and keeps primary and secondary education gaps closed for the third year running.”
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India vs Bangladesh
Speaking about the vast difference between the performance of Bangladesh and India, Roberto Crotti, a co-author of the report, said a big factor was the sex ratio at birth.
“A big difference is the sex ratio at birth. India comes 146/149 on this index, but in Bangladesh the sex ratio is natural…The missing women issue is really holding India back,” he added.
“Compared to India, Bangladesh [also] performs better when it comes to political empowerment at the senior level… There are more women in senior positions than in India,” he added.
Notably, the two of Bangladesh’s tallest leaders are women, former prime minister Khaleda Zia and incumbent Sheikh Hasina.
“The labour force participation rate [in Bangladesh] is 35 per cent, compared to 28 per cent in India,” Crotti added.
Talking about the way forward for India, he said “what could… help India is creating better opportunities for women in the labour force”.
“Women have more technical skills, but that needs to be followed by legislation, awareness, and access to rights and opportunities,” he added.
“What we would expect is that when women are politically empowered, the gender gap is pushed up on their agendas, and with time we would see improvements in other dimensions like labour participation, land rights, and inheritance,” he said.
“But this will take a long time. Over the past 10 years, India has had women in heads-of-state positions 20 per cent of the time — that’s pretty good — but it will take a long time for mentalities to change,” he added. “At the moment, only 13 per cent of women occupy senior positions in the government.”
Artificial Intelligence
Unique to this year’s report is a study on the advent of Artificial Intelligence and its effects on the gender gap. The results are not encouraging, and, according to the report, such data “demonstrates a persistent structural gender gap among AI professionals, with well differentiated career trajectories taken by men and women in today’s labour market”.
This is particularly relevant for India, which has the second biggest AI talent pool but an employment scenario vastly dominated by men: According to the report, while 78 per cent of India’s AI professionals are men, 22 per cent are women.
India has much work to do, or else, the report warns, its disparity will continue to “entrench and deepen gender gaps”, making it all the more difficult to climb the ranks.