India was ranked at 127 out of 146 countries in terms of gender parity — an improvement of eight places from last year, according to the annual Gender Gap Report, 2023 of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
India was ranked 135 in the report’s 2022 edition. The country had 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 had attained parity in enrolment across all levels of education, it said.
India had closed 64.3% of the overall gender gap, the report said. However, it underlined that India had reached only 36.7 % 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% of its gender gap, according to the report.
Wages and income
In India, while there had been uptick in parity in wages and income, the share of women in senior positions and technical roles had dropped slightly since the last edition, the report pointed out.
On political empowerment, India has registered 25.3% parity, with women representing 15.1% of parliamentarians — the highest for the country since the inaugural report in 2006.
Out of the 117 countries with available data since 2017, 18 countries — including Bolivia (50.4%), India (44.4%) and France (42.3 %) — have achieved women’s representation of over 40% 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 issue with it in Geneva.
For India, the 1.9 percentage point improvement in sex ratio at birth had driven up parity after more than a decade of slow progress, the report said.
Skewed sex ratios
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 with top scoring countries that register a 94.4% gender parity at birth, the indicator stands at 92.7% for India (albeit an improvement over the last edition) and below 90% for Vietnam, China and Azerbaijan,” it said.
Overall, the Southern Asian region has achieved 63.4% gender parity, the second-lowest of the eight regions.
The score in South Asia has risen by 1.1 percentage points since the last edition on the basis of the constant sample of countries covered since 2006. The improvement is partially attributable to the rise in scores of populous countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
