India has ranked at 127 out of 146 countries in terms of gender parity — an improvement of eight places from last year — according to the World Economic Forum’s annual Gender Gap Report, 2023.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked India at 135 out of 146 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index in the report’s 2022 edition.
India has improved by 1.4 percentage points and eight positions since the last edition, marking a partial recovery towards its 2020 parity level, the report stated.
The country has attained parity in enrolment across all levels of education, it said.
India has closed 64.3 per cent of the overall gender gap, the report said. However, it underlined that India has reached only 36.7 per cent parity on economic participation and opportunity.
The index ranked India’s neighbours Pakistan at 142, Bangladesh at 59, China at 107, Nepal at 116, Sri Lanka at 115 and Bhutan at 103.
Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world for the 14th consecutive year and the only one to have closed more than 90 per cent of its gender gap, according to the report.
In India, while there has been uptick in parity in wages and income, the share of women in senior positions and technical roles have dropped slightly since the last edition, the report pointed out.
Out of the 117 countries with available data since 2017, 18 countries — including Bolivia (50.4 per cent), India (44.4 per cent) and France (42.3 per cent) — have achieved women’s representation of over 40 per cent in local governance.
This comes after Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani earlier this year said the WEF recognised the need to enumerate women’s participation in local government bodies in its Gender Gap Report after the government raised the with it in Geneva.
For India, the 1.9 percentage point improvement in sex ratio at birth has driven up parity after more than a decade of slow progress, the report said.
However, it also said that for Vietnam, Azerbaijan, India and China, the relatively low overall rankings on the Health and Survival sub-index is explained by skewed sex ratios at birth.
“Compared to top scoring countries that register a 94.4 per cent gender parity at birth, the indicator stands at 92.7 per cent for India (albeit an improvement over last edition) and below 90 per cent for Vietnam, China and Azerbaijan,” it said.
Overall, the Southern Asian region has achieved 63.4 per cent gender parity, the second-lowest of the eight regions.
