2021 Global Gender Gap Index: Key findings and India’s Rank

April 1, 2021

The World Economic Forum has released the Global Gender Gap Report 2021. India has seen a decrease in its ranking on the index by 28 places.

Key Points

India has been ranked 140th among 156 countries on the index. With this, India became the third-worst performer in South Asia.
As per the index, India has closed 62.5% of its gender gap to date.
In 2020, India was ranked 112th among 153 countries.
The decline also took place on the economic participation and opportunity subindex.
The report highlighted that India’s gender gap on this dimension widened by 3% this year, leading to a 32.6% gap closed till date.
Most of the decrease has been seen on the political empowerment subindex, where India regressed 13.5 percentage points. The women ministers have declined to 9.1% in 2021 from 23.1% in 2019).
One of the drivers of this decline is a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, which decreased from 24.8% to 22.3%.
The share of women in professional and technical roles also decreased to 29.2%.
In senior and managerial positions, the share of women is also low. Only 14.6% of these positions are held by women and only 8.9% of firms are with female top managers.
The income earned by women in India is the only 1/5th of that earned by men. This has put India among the bottom 10 globally on this indicator.
Discrimination against women is also seen in the health and survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India has been ranked among the bottom five countries in this subindex.

India and its Neighbours

Among India’s neighbors, Nepal has been ranked 106, Bangladesh 65, Afghanistan 156, Pakistan 153, Sri Lanka 116, and Bhutan 130.
South Asia is the second-lowest performer on the index among regions. The region has an overall gender gap closed at 62.3%.
In the South Asia region, only two countries- Pakistan and Afghanistan have been ranked below India.

Iceland has topped the index for the 12th time and is the most gender-equal country in the world. The top 10 most gender-equal countries are Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Rwanda, Sweden, Ireland, and Switzerland.

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