Global Gender Gap Index 2022- Relevance for UPSC Exam
Global Gender Gap Index 2022: Global Gender Gap Index 2022 is a very important index that measures status of gender gap in various countries. Global Gender Gap Index 2022 is important for UPSC Mains GS Paper 2 (Governance, Administration and Challenges- Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes)
Global Gender Gap Index 2022 in News
Recently, the Global Gender Gap Index for 2022 was released by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Global Gender Gap Index 2022 ranks India at 135 out of 146 countries. In 2022, India’s overall score has improved from 0.625 (in 2021) to 0.629.
In 2021, India was ranked 140 out of 156 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index.
What is Global Gender Gap Index?
Background: The Global Gender Gap Report was first published in 2006 by the World Economic Forum.
About: The Global Gender Gap Index is an index designed to measure gender equality by tracking progress towards closing gender gaps over time.
Releasing Body: Global Gender Gap Index is released by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Parameters: The Global Gender Gap index “benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions-
Economic Participation and Opportunity,
Educational Attainment,
Health and Survival, and
Political Empowerment.
Ranking Method: On each of the four sub-indices as well as on the overall index the GGG index provides scores between 0 and 1, where 1 shows full gender parity and 0 is complete imparity.
Global Gender Gap Index 2022
Pic Credit- WEF
India’s Performance on Global Gender Gap Index 2022
On Political Empowerment: This includes metrics such as the percentage of women in Parliament, the percentage of women in ministerial positions etc.
Of all the sub-indices, this is where India ranks the highest (48th out of 146).
Iceland is ranked 1 with a score of 0.874 and Bangladesh is ranked 9 with a score of 0.546.
India’s score on this metric has worsened since last year – from 0.276 to 0.267.
The silver lining is that despite reduction, India’s score is above the global average in this category.
On Economic Participation and Opportunity: This includes metrics such as the percentage of women who are part of the labour force, wage equality for similar work, earned income etc.
Here, too, India ranks a lowly 143 out of the 146 countries in contention even though its score has improved over 2021 from 0.326 to 0.350.
India’s score is much lower than the global average, and only Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are behind India on this metric.
On Educational Attainment: This sub-index includes metrics such as literacy rate and the enrolment rates in primary, secondary and tertiary education.
Here India ranks 107th out of 146, and its score has marginally worsened since last year.
In 2021, India was ranked 114 out of 156.
On Health and Survival: This includes two metrics- the sex ratio at birth (in %) and healthy life expectancy (in years).
In this metric, India is ranked the last (146) among all the countries.
Its score hasn’t changed from 2021 when it was ranked 155th out of 156 countries.