India, ranking 129th in the world with a population of over 1.4 billion, has closed 64.1% of the gender gap by 2024.
The Southern Asian economy is ranked -2 in this result, slightly lower than in the previous edition (0.17 percentage points).
According to a World Economic Forum-Global Gender Gap 2024, report, economic participation and opportunity are slightly improving. But educational attainment and political empowerment are slightly declining, which is the main cause of this regression.
Despite an upward trend over the last four editions, India’s economic parity score would require an additional 6.2 percentage points to reach its 2012 score of 46%, the WEF report states.
WEF Data points:
To achieve the goal, India must bridge and increase:
• The gender gaps in management, senior officials, and legislative roles (14.4%)
• Labor force participation (45.9%)
• Estimated earned income (28.6%)
• Professional and technical workers (49.4%)
The country ranks among the top 10 in the political empowerment sub-index with a head-of-state indicator score of 40.7%.
It continues to have relatively low scores for the percentage of women in parliament (17.2%) and in ministerial positions (6.9%) at the federal level.
This is due to declines in educational attainment and political empowerment. But the country has slightly improved in economic participation and opportunity, the report says.
Overall, the countries with the lowest levels of economic parity are Bangladesh (31.1%), Sudan (33.7%), Iran (34.3%), Pakistan (36%), India (39.8%), and Morocco (40.6%).
All listed economies have less than 30% gender parity in income and under 50% in workforce participation.
Globally, women’s underrepresentation in the workforce, particularly in senior and managerial roles, is a significant weakness, with senior roles having the lowest gender parity.