Glaring gender gap

Despite receiving its best score in almost two decades, Pakistan remains near the bottom of the list of countries ranked by gender gap. Pakistan was ranked 142 out of 146 countries analysed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), with only Iran, Algeria, Chad and Afghanistan getting lower scores. Amazingly, that is still an improvement — we were second-last in 2022, with only perennial last-place finisher Afghanistan faring worse. The WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report ranks countries on the basis of gender parity in terms of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. While the top of the table is dominated by Scandinavian countries such as Iceland, Norway and Finland — the top three — and other familiar Western states such as New Zealand and Germany, there are a few developing countries that did well, including Nicaragua, Namibia and Rwanda, which were ranked 7^th, 8^th and 12^th, respectively. Asia’s top-ranked country was the Philippines, at 16^th.

While optimists will note that Pakistan has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years and could fairly be considered among the most improved, it is only because we were atrocious in every measure to begin with. It is also worth noting that many of the improved indicators could suffer due to the state of the economy, including the “economic participation and opportunities” sub-index, since widespread job losses tend to affect women more as they work in only a handful of professions due to social norms. The rankings for education and health are also among the lowest in the world, despite affirmative action, such as reserved seats and segregated education options. Even the one area where we did crack the top 100 is political empowerment, and the only reason we ranked as ‘high’ as 95^th place is because of reserved seats — only nine of the 45 women in the National Assembly were directly elected.

As long as bridging the gender gap is not given due attention, we will continue to underutilise half of our population, making development of any sort a distant dream.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 24^th, 2023.

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