Saba Rajkotia
17th December 2019
In 2019, India’s position on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report fell from 108th to 112th. This drop is attributed to India now being ranked in the bottom-five in the world in terms of disparity in women’s health and survival and economic participation. As such, India now ranks below countries like China (106th), Sri Lanka (102nd), Nepal (101st) and Bangladesh (50th). Yemen, Iraq and Pakistan occupy the bottom three with Yemen at 153rd and Pakistan at 151st.
Although the time it will take to close the gender gap worldwide narrowed to 99.5 years from 108 years in the previous year, it will still take more than a lifetime to achieve equality between men and women across health, education, employment and politics. The World Economic Forum attributes this improvement to the significant increase in the number of women in politics. The time it will take to close the political gap has fallen from 107 years to 95 years, but the economic opportunity gap has worsened – increasing from 202 to 257 years.
India has followed a similar trend. From 2006 to 2019, India has improved only in terms of political empowerment – moving up to 18th place. It has slipped significantly to 112th place in terms of educational attainment, 149th in terms of economic participation, and 150th place in terms of health and survival. As such, India’s overall rank has fallen from 98th place to 112th in 13 years – on average dropping at least a position a year.
The World Economic Forum based its rankings on a number of factors. It found that India offers extremely limited economic opportunities for women and has very low female representation on company boards. Millions of women across India do not get the same access to health and healthcare as men, and the country has an abnormally low sex ratio with 91 girls for every 100 boys.
According to the Gender Gap Report, India is the only one on the list of 153 countries where the economic gender gap is larger than the political one. Only 23% of Indian women are in paid work, compared to 82% of men. Furthermore, the estimated income of women in India is one of the lowest in the world at just one-fifth of the male income.
The Economic Times cites the World Economic Forum, “Violence, forced marriage and discrimination in access to health remain pervasive. The situation and the trend are more positive in terms of gender gaps in education… But a large difference persists for literacy rate; only two-thirds of women are literate compared with 82 per cent of men”.
India has ranked higher in the case of political empowerment because the country has had a female leader for 20 of the last 50 years. Today, however, female political representation is still low with women only making up 14.4 per cent of Parliament and 23 per cent of the cabinet.
Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab said, “Supporting gender parity is critical to ensuring strong, cohesive and resilient societies around the world”.
