India’s economic parity stood at 39.8% meaning that women in India on an average earn Rs 39.8 for every Rs 100 that men earn.
Representational Picture (photo IANS)
India has slipped two spots to rank at 129 out of the 146 nations in the list of World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index data released on Wednesday.
The index highlighted that India is figured among the group of nations to have one of the lowest level economic gender parity.
India’s economic parity stood at 39.8% meaning that women in India on an average earn Rs 39.8 for every Rs 100 that men earn.
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The report further noted that India has closed 64.1% of its gender gap in 2024. While India’s economic parity score has been improving, it needs to increase by 6.2% points to return to its 2012 level of 46%.
As per the WEF index, the war-torn Sudan has replaced Afghanistan to stand at the last rank as the Taliban ruled Islamic nation was not covered in this year’s data.
Besides Afghanistan, Malawi, Myanmar and Russia were also not covered.
The report said that Bangladesh has the lowest level of economic gender parity at 31.1%.
The lowest levels of economic gender parity were also observed in Sudan: 33.7%; Iran: 34.3%; Pakistan 36%, and Morocco: 40.6%.
“These economies all register less than 30% gender parity in estimated earned income,” the report said. It said that bridging the gap in the economic participation and opportunity between men and women is the second biggest hurdle in dealing with the global gender gap.
Liberia with 87.4% and Botswana with 85.4% remain the economies where economic gender parity is highest.
WEF highlighted that these nations have a 95% or above labour-force participation of women.
Iceland topped this year’s list as the most gender-equal country in the world, while Finland and Norway followed next.
Some of the other top ranking key countries were the United Kingdom at 14, Denmark 15, South Africa 18.
The United States ranked 43, Italy 87, Israel 91, South Korea 94, and Bangladesh at 99.
Considering the set of 101 countries continuously covered since 2006, the gender gap has closed by 0.1% point since 2023, according to the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024.
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