Context: Another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021. 

• As the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be felt, closing the global gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 years to 135.6 years.

Key Findings

• India is now ranked 140 among 156 countries and has fallen 28 places and is now one of the worst performers in South Asia, trailing behind neighbours Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
• The report estimates that it will take South Asia 195.4 years to close the gender gap, while Western Europe will take 52.1 years.

Global Trends and Outcomes
Political Empowerment

• Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 parliament seats and just 22.6% of over 3,400 ministers worldwide.
• At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
• While India has declined on the political empowerment index as well by 13.5 percentage points, and a decline in the number of women ministers, from 23.1 per cent in 2019 to 9.1 per cent in 2021, it has still performed relatively well compared to other countries, ranking at 51 in women’s participation in politics. 
• Bangladesh is “the only country where more women have held head-of-state positions than men in the past 50 years,” says the report.

Economic Participation and Opportunity
According to this year’s index results 58% of this gap has been closed so far. 

• The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report and as a result we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.

The estimated earned income of women in India is only one-fifth of men’s, which puts the country among the bottom 10 globally on this indicator.

Possible Reason

• On one hand, the proportion of women among skilled professionals continues to increase, as does progress towards wage equality, albeit at a slower pace. 
• On the other hand, overall income disparities are still only part-way towards being bridged and there is a persistent lack of women in leadership positions, with women representing just 27% of all manager positions.

Educational Attainment and Health and Survival

• The index estimates that on its current trajectory, it will take another 14.2 years to completely close this gap. 
• In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. 
• There are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic, as well as continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
• In the index of education attainment, India has been ranked at 114.

In the Health and Survival index that India has fared the worst, ranking at 155 — the only country to have fared worse is China. 

Reason

• It says the ratio can be attributed to norms of son preference and gender-biased prenatal sex-selective practices. 
• China and India together account for about 90 to 95 per cent of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million missing female births annually worldwide due to gender-biased prenatal sex selective practices.