A continuing concern

Health, economic disparity responsible for India's gender gaps

Each year since 2006, the World Economic Forum, which is most famously associated with the annual Davos meet, has been bringing out a Global Gender Gap report. In essence, the report maps the performance of different countries on an index that evaluates the parity among men and women across four thematic dimensions or sub-divisions — economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The latest edition of the report has put India at 108th among the 149 countries included in the index. The report deserves the attention of policymakers, given the richness of data that may guide efforts to achieving gender parity in India. Among the broad takeaways, the report notes that political empowerment and economic participation are the two categories where there is the maximum divergence in gender parity scores. The global average (weighted by population) is 68 per cent, which is a marginal improvement over last year. In other words, to date, there is still a 32 per cent average gender gap that remains to be closed. But this gender gap extends to over 77 per cent when it comes to political empowerment and over 44 per cent in relation to economic participation. According to the WEF’s projections, it will take over 200 years to close the gender gaps in political empowerment. 

India is one of the countries that has done well on the political empowerment of women; it is ranked 20th in the world on this count. But while India’s rank has stayed the same over the past year, its overall score has slipped marginally from the 2017 score. That was a contributory factor why, within South Asia (which includes six other countries), India slipped a notch to fourth slot in 2018. That is particularly disappointing because, as a region, South Asia’s gender parity score (66 per cent) is below the global average. While it is true that South Asian countries, collectively, are not far from their much richer counterparts in East Asia and Pacific, that is cold comfort when one notices that some of the poorest countries such as Rwanda and Nicaragua are among the top 10 nations on the same index. 

Beyond the relatively modest ranking, what is particularly worrisome for India is that while its overall score has improved since 2006, gender gaps have worsened in two of the four categories. These two sectors are health and survival, and economic participation and opportunity. The index scores countries on gender parity between 1 (full parity) and 0 (complete disparity). In health, India has slid from a rank of 103 in 2006 to a rank of 147. In economic participation and opportunity, India’s gender parity rank has sunk from 110 in 2006 to 142 in 2018. This is particularly alarming as it coincides with a period when India has registered its fastest growth on all economic parameters. On health, India could learn from Sri Lanka, which has stayed world number 1 since 2006. On improving women’s participation in the economic sphere, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are better than India, though both countries have steadily been worsening on this count since 2006. India perhaps will do well to learn from the efforts of countries such as Bangaldesh, or Rwanda.