According to WEF, Pakistan is the second-worst nation for women

 

According to WEF, Pakistan is the second-worst nation for women

 

Keywords: Gender parity, Second, WEF, Pakistani Women

 

The World Economic Forum (WEF) released a study on gender parity on Wednesday, ranking Pakistan as the second-worst nation.

In a survey of 146 nations, Pakistan was ranked 145th by the Global Gender Gap Report. Afghanistan was the only country that performed worse than Pakistan.

Pakistan, which has 107 million women, came in at 56.4% on the gender gap index of the study.

The other three nations that made the list of the five worst performers were Chad, Iran, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In terms of gender parity, the WEF report ranked Iceland first in the world, followed by Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden, in that order.

Since the WEF's 2006 introduction of its global gender gap study, Pakistan has posted "this is the highest overall level of parity," according to the report.

The research commended Pakistan for making "substantial improvements" in all three sub-indices, with the greatest improvements in women's economic opportunity and engagement. Pakistan was one of five nations having a gender disparity that was higher than 5%. India, China, Qatar, and Azerbaijan were the other countries.

While the gender gap score for wage equality is larger than for all other economic indicators, progress was also made in the area of projected earned income, where women's earnings increased by 4% from 2021 to 2022. However, women's employment participation fell by 1.9 percentage points.

Gender parity ratings for literacy, secondary, and tertiary enrollment in education improved in terms of educational attainment. In secondary and higher education, there were more male and female students in 2022 than there were in 2021.

Pakistan came in at position 145 in terms of economic opportunity and participation, 135 in terms of educational achievement, 143 in terms of health and survival, and 95 in terms of political empowerment.

In the 146 nations included in the 2022 index, there was a 95.8% reduction in the gender gap in health and survival, a 94.4% reduction in the gender gap in educational attainment, a 60.3% reduction in the gender gap in economic participation, and a 22% reduction in the gender gap in political empowerment.

While none of the top 10 economies have reached complete gender parity, at least 80% of their gaps have been closed, with Iceland leading the pack (90.8%)

Additionally, Pakistan was rated as the second-worst nation in South Asia. The best nation in the area for women, according to the survey, is Bangladesh, which is followed by Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bhutan, and India. Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Only 62.3 percent of the gender gap has been narrowed in South Asia, the least of the eight regions highlighted in the research. The time it has taken South Asia to close the gender gap has increased to 197 years due to the lack of development since the prior edition. In terms of the gender inequalities that were measured, South Asia scored poorly, and most nations have made little improvement since the last edition.

With advances in the proportion of women in professional and technical occupations, particularly in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, the economic gender gap shrunk by 1.8%.

In Pakistan and the Maldives, however, fewer women were employed in technical and professional positions.

The only region lower than South Asia in terms of educational achievement is sub-Saharan Africa. One of the key measures of education, the literacy rate, remained stable in five nations. The survey discovered that South Asia, with a score of 94.2%, had one of the lowest regional gender parity ratings for health and survival.

Only Sri Lanka closed the gender gap in this sub-index, with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India having the lowest global results. In big, densely populated nations like India and Pakistan, the sex ratio at birth is still very low, but parity has been achieved in Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka.

South Asia ranks fourth among regions in terms of political empowerment, having reached gender parity of 26.3%, a 0.7 percentage point decrease from the 2021 edition.