By Dr. Santosh Kumar Mohapatra*

The one of the objectives of celebrating international women’s day is to reduce gender inequality or gender gap which is  elusive still now and has widen in 2020.  The Global Gender Gap Index was first introduced by the World Economic Forum in 2006 to benchmark progress towards gender parity and compare economies’ gender gaps across four dimensions: economic opportunities, education, health, and political leadership. In other words, the WEF report benchmarks the evolution of gender-based gaps in four areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.

It also examines the drivers of gender gaps and outlines the policies and practices needed for a gender-inclusive recovery. By providing economy rankings, the report incentivises comparisons across regions and economies and stimulates learning on the drivers of gender gaps and policies to close them.

Global Gender Gap Index 2021 published in March 2021 continues to build on the methodology established with that inaugural report, offering a consistent metric to assess progress over time. Countries are ranked according to the Global Gender Gap Index, which measures scores across these indicators on a 0 to 100 scale, and these scores are interpreted as distance to gender parity, or the percentage of the gender gap that has been closed in a country.

The report stated that India, home to 65 crore women, has widened its gender gap and has closed 62.5% of its gender gap to date down from 66.8% one year ago. The report said India’s gender gap on this dimension widened by 3% this year, leading to a 32.65 % gap closed to date.

The report estimates that it will take an average of 135.6 years for women and men to reach parity on a range of factors worldwide, instead of the 99.5 years outlined in the 2020 report. In other words, the time it will take for the gender gap to close grew by 36 years in the space of just 12 months, thirty-six years marks the largest loss in one year since the report started in 2006. In India, in the 2020 index, it was expected that it would take 99.5 years to bring equality between men and women but as per the 2021 report, it would take 265 years, which means one generation.

According to the report, India has slipped 28 places to rank 140th among 156 countries. In Global Gender Gap Index 2020, the country had ranked 112th among 153 countries. Among India’s neighbours, Bangladesh ranked 65, Nepal 106, Pakistan 153, Afghanistan 156, Bhutan 130, and Sri Lanka 116. Among regions- South Asia, India is the second-lowest performer on the index. Bangladesh which is the best-performing country in the region has closed 71.9% of its gender gap so far.

The new report included data for three countries for the first time this year: Afghanistan, which ranks 156th; Guyana, which ranks 53rd; and Niger, which ranks 138th. The U.S. rose up the rankings 23 places this year to 30th place, largely due to an increase in women’s political empowerment, marked by an increase in women in Congress and a significant increase of women in ministerial positions as of January 2021, with the latter jumping from 21% to 46%. While Western Europe was the best performing region, the Middle East and North Africa region continues to have the largest gender gap, due in large part to the wide economic gender gap with just 31% of women taking part in the labour force.

Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world for the 12th time. Nordic countries led the way again as Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Rwanda, Sweden, Ireland, and Switzerland topped the list as the most gender-equal countries in the world. Iceland took the top spot for the 12th time since the report first started 15 years ago, with only 10.8% of its gender gap yet to close.

In world, although the report notes some progress in education and health, there are several sobering statistics relating to higher economic hurdles, declining political participation, and workplace challenges, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. With women holding only 26.1% of parliamentary seats and 22.6% of ministerial positions worldwide, the political gender gap is expected to take more than 145 years to close if it remains on its current trajectory, compared to 95 years in the 2020 edition of the report. The economic gender gap is not expected to close until the year 2288, with only a marginal improvement since last year.

In India, the decline also took place in the economic participation and opportunity subindex, albeit to a lesser extent. Most of the decline occurred on the political empowerment subindex, where India regressed 13.5 percentage points, with a significant decline in the number of women ministers (from 23.1% in 2019 to 9.1% in 2021).

In India, inadequate representation of women in professional/technical or senior management roles is further exacerbating the economic participation gender gap, under-representation of women in politics thus often neglecting the need for gender-sensitive and inclusive policies, gender-based income disparity in both organized and unorganized sectors. In agriculture, construction, etc. women are paid far less than men, and dysfunctional and poor healthcare for women leads to high maternal mortality and malnutrition lowering their economic participation.

Tanya Singh, Director, IPE Global, a think tank international development consulting firm, told The Sunday Guardian: “The pandemic has a huge role in widening the gender gap. The WEF Global Gender Gap 2021 report also states the same explicitly. With schools and nurseries partially open, women are taking on most of the unpaid care work, reducing their hours or giving up paid work.

They are more often than expected to care for the family and, are fit into the stereotypical roles of cooking, cleaning, parenting, etc. Many women are also on the frontline, delivering essential services, usually the lowest paid or in insecure work.

It is without a doubt that the pandemic has disproportionately affected the lives of women who are now into double duty and required to juggle between work and home. This is exhausting them both mentally and physically, thus forcing many to quit their jobs. The widening of economic participation gender gap by 3% as per WEF 2021 Report is a reflection of this fact.”

Several factors have led to this poor performance by India in the WEF report. Skewed distribution of resources and opportunities between men and women, and lagging female to male literacy evident from the NSO study-Household Social Consumption: Education in India as part of the 75th round of National Sample Survey (NSS), are some of the factors.

The report pegged India’s country-wide female literacy rate at 70.3% and male literacy rate around 84.7%.. “Conversely, 96.2% of the educational attainment subindex gender gap has been closed, with parity achieved in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. Yet, gender gaps persist in terms of literacy: one-third of women are illiterate <34.2%> compared to 17.6% of men”.

Among the drivers of this decline is a decrease in women’s labour force participation rate, which fell from 24.8% to 22.3%. In addition, the share of women in professional and technical roles declined further to 29.2%. The share of women in senior and managerial positions also remains low: only 14.6% of these positions are held by women and there are only 8.9% firms with female top managers”.

Further, the estimated earned income of women in India is only one-fifth of men’s, which puts the country among the bottom 10 globally on this indicator. Discrimination against women is also reflected in the health and survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex.

Wide gaps in sex ratio at birth are due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. In addition, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime. With the WEF 2021 report data staring in our face, the country must invest and commit towards this for a more promising future to meet its commitments towards achieving the UN SDGs.

The author is an Odisha-based eminent columnist/economist and social thinker. He can be reached through e-mail at [email protected]

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of Sambad English.