Global Gender Gap Report 2025

Mains Syllabus: GS II - Salient features of Indian Society, Role of women and women’s organisation, population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues, Social empowerment.

Why in the News?

Recently, the World Economic Forum has released Global Gender Gap Index Report 2025.

What is Global Gender Gap Index?

• Global Gender Gap Index - It annually benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions (subindexes).

• 19th Edition - It benchmarks gender parity across 148 economies, providing a basis for the analysis of gender parity developments across two-thirds of the world’s economies
• Scale - The Global Gender Gap Index measures scores on a 0-1 scale, and scores can be interpreted as the distance covered towards parity i.e. the percentage of the gender gap that has been closed, numbers rounded.
• Cross-economy Comparisons – It supports the identification of the most effective policies to close gender gaps.

What is the position of India in the index?

• India’s Rank - In 2025 India ranks 131st, with an overall gender parity score of 64.4%.
• Relative Drop in Rank - Compared to the 2024 edition, India sees a relative drop in rank (-3) due to the performance of other economies.
• Overall Improvement – India’s overall performance improves in absolute terms by +0.3 points.
• Increase in Economic Participation And Opportunity – In this sub index, India has improved by +0.9 percentage points with  the parity in estimated earned income rises from 28.6% to 29.9%.
• Stable Labour Participation - Scores in labour force participation rate remained the same (45.9%) as last year — India’s highest achieved to date.
• Improvement in Educational Attainment - India scores 97.1%, reflecting positive shifts in female shares for literacy and tertiary education enrolment.
• Higher parity in Health and Survival – It is driven by improved scores in sex ratio at birth and in healthy life expectancy.
• Drop in Political Empowerment - Female representation in parliament falls from 14.7% to 13.8% in 2025 and the share of women in ministerial roles falls from 6.5% to 5.6%lowering the indicator score for the second year in a row below 2023 levels.

What lies ahead?

• There is a need to consolidate and improve on the gains and make efforts to set right the lacunae with policies and political will.
• Political parties can be encouraged from increasing women’s participation in the electoral process, even before the law necessitates it.
• Effective implementation of women reservation act will help in reducing the gap in political participation.

References

1. The Hindu | Mind the gap
2. WEF | Global Gender Gap Index report 2025