Global Gender Gap: Is it Closing?

Not surprisingly, the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland top the gender gap index in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Report, released on November 8. While each of the top 20 countries made progress relative to their 2006 scores, Latvia (now 13th) and Lithuania (now 14th) made the most significant advances, jumping six and seven places respectively. The United States, ranked 31st in this year’s report, saw a mixed performance that dropped it six places from a year ago.

The methodology of the report rests on measuring the size of the gender gap in four critical areas of inequality between men and women:

• Economic participation and opportunity: outcomes on salaries, labor force participation, and access to high-skilled employment;
• Educational attainment: outcomes on access to basic and higher education;
• Political empowerment: outcomes on representation in decision-making structures and processes; and
• Health and survival: outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.

On the global level, progress has been made since 2006 in narrowing the economic participation, educational attainment, and political empowerment gaps, but the gap on health has increased over the past year. One of the most interesting findings of the report is the strong correlation between gender gap scores and economic competitiveness. While causality cannot be inferred from this finding, the implications of it are clear: “countries that do not fully capitalize effectively on one-half of their human resources run the risk of undermining their competitive potential.” Therefore, not only is gender equality a moral imperative, it is a critical objective on the strategic front as well; will this propel the issue further up the agendas of key international leaders and policymakers? To see interviews of the report’s coauthors, click here and here.