The advancement of women carries a significant impact on the growth of nations. There is therefore an increasingly urgent need to close gender gaps and leverage the talents of both women and men.
The World Economic Forum puts a strong emphasis on addressing this challenge – a challenge that transcends across the majority of the world’s cultures, industries and income groups – through a multistakeholder approach.
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007 released by the World Economic Forum on November 8, 2007, hopes to lead to greater awareness of the challenges and opportunities linked to the global gender gap in business, education, politics and health, and serve as a catalyst for change in both high- and low-ranking countries.
"The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report is a framework for capturing the magnitude of gender-based disparities across the world and tracking how they evolve over time,” said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.
The report is the result of collaboration between Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Centre for International Development at Harvard University; Laura Tyson, Professor of Business Administration and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; and Saadia Zahidi.
The Global Gender Gap Report 2007 is based on the innovative new methodology introduced last year and includes detailed profiles that provide insight into the economic, legal and social aspects of the gender gap in each country. The report measures the size of the gender gap in four critical areas of inequality between men and women:
1. Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment.
2. Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education.
3. Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures.
4. Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.
The report also provides some evidence on the link between the gender gap and the economic performance of countries. “We hope to highlight the economic incentive behind empowering women in addition to promoting equality as a basic human right," added Laura Tyson.
Some findings
The new report has expanded its coverage from 115 countries last year to 128 countries, adding several new economies from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and covering over 90% of the world’s population.
The four Nordic countries viz. Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, once again, top the first four ranks in gender equality measured by Gender Gap Index.
The Philippines (6) and Sri Lanka (15) remain distinctive for being the only Asian countries in the top 20 of the rankings. Sri Lanka (15) fell two places in the rankings, having been outperformed by Latvia and Lithuania, but its overall performance in 2007 has improved relative to its performance in 2006.
Sri Lanka showed improvements on the ratio of women and men’s labour force participation rates as well as wage equality for similar work. On political empowerment (7), Sri Lanka continues to hold a privileged position, having been led by a female head of state for 21 of the last 50 years. It also continues to have the smallest gap on educational attainment (56) as compared to other countries in South Asia.
Finally, Bangladesh (100), India (114), Nepal (125) and Pakistan (126) continue to hold some of the lowest positions in the Asian rankings. While Bangladesh, India and Pakistan perform very poorly on the economic, education and health sub-indexes, their overall scores are partially bolstered by relatively good performances on political empowerment (Bangladesh ranks 17th, India 21st and Pakistan 43rd on this sub-index).
Relative to their own performances in 2006, Bangladesh and Pakistan register small increases in scores, while India’s sex ratio at birth fell to 0.89 girls for every boy, causing its overall score to decrease.
Overall, there was no improvement in gender gap among these countries; instead in some case it worsened. For instance, India’s rank during last year (2006) was 102 and went backward to 114 in the current year (2007).
The entire report and individual country highlights and profiles are available at the World Economic Forum webpage.
Source: The World Economic Forum
Posted from: http://southasia.oneworld.net/
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