Talent is one of the most essential factors for growth and competitiveness. To build future economies that are both dynamic and inclusive, we must ensure that everyone has equal opportunity. When women and girls are not integrated—as both beneficiary and shaper—the global community loses out on skills, ideas and perspectives that are critical for addressing global challenges and harnessing new opportunities.
This report finds that, globally, gender parity is shifting into reverse this year for the first time since the World Economic Forum started measuring it. Yet there are also many countries that have made considerable progress, understanding that talent is a critical factor for growth. These countries are poised for further success. This year’s analysis also reveals gender gaps at the industry level and, in particular, highlights that even though qualified women are coming out of the education system, many industries are failing to hire, retain and promote them, losing out on a wealth of capacity.
As the world moves from capitalism into the era of talentism, competitiveness on a national and on a business level will be decided more than ever before by the innovative capacity of a country or a company. In this new context, the integration of women into the talent pool becomes a must.
While no single measure can capture the complete situation, the Global Gender Gap Index presented in this report seeks to measure one important aspect of gender equality: the relative gaps between women and men across four key areas: health, education, economy and politics.
The Index was developed in part to address the need for a consistent and comprehensive measure for gender equality that can track a country’s progress over time. The Index does not seek to set priorities for countries but, rather, to provide a comprehensive set of data and a clear method for tracking gaps on critical indicators so that countries may set priorities within their own economic, political and cultural contexts. The Index also points to potential role models by revealing those countries that—within their region or income group—are leaders in distributing resources more equitably between women and men, regardless of the overall level of available resources.
The Forum’s work in the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Education, Gender and Work provides a platform for leaders from all stakeholder groups to collaborate, devise solutions and share best practices to close gender gaps. In particular, because progress on education has not resulted in equivalent gains for women in earning opportunity, economic independence and leadership, the Forum’s Closing the Gender Gap project aims to accelerate the pace of change on gender parity through global dialogue and a national public-private cooperation model currently practiced in several futureready countries.
On behalf of the Forum, I would like to express my appreciation to Till Alexander Leopold, Vesselina Ratcheva, Richard Samans and Saadia Zahidi for their leadership of this project. We greatly appreciate, too, the innovative data collaboration with LinkedIn and the ongoing support of Ricardo Hausmann and Laura D. Tyson. I would also like to thank the whole team engaged in the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Education, Gender and Work for their support in shaping this project. Finally, we are inspired by the leadership of the Stewards and Partners of the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Education, Gender and Work.
It is our hope that this latest edition of the report will serve as a call to action to governments to accelerate gender equality through bolder policy-making, to businesses to prioritize gender equality as a critical economic and moral imperative and to all of us to become deeply conscious of the choices we make every day that impact gender equality globally. We call upon every reader of this report to join these efforts.
Key Findings
The Global Gender Gap Index was first introduced by the World Economic Forum in 2006 as a framework for capturing the magnitude of gender-based disparities and tracking their progress over time. This year’s edition of the Report benchmarks 144 countries on their progress towards gender parity on a scale from 0 (imparity) to 1 (parity) across four thematic dimensions—Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment— and provides country rankings that allow for effective comparisons across regions and income groups. The rankings are designed to create global awareness of the challenges posed by gender gaps and the opportunities created by reducing them. The methodology and quantitative analysis behind the rankings are intended to serve as a basis for designing effective measures for reducing gender gaps. The methodology of the Index has remained stable since its original conception in 2006, providing a basis for robust cross-country and time-series analysis.
The 2017 Report’s key findings are:
- Weighted by population, in 2017, the average progress on closing the global gender gap stands at 68.0%— meaning an average gap of 32.0% remains to be closed worldwide across the four Index dimensions in order to achieve universal gender parity, compared to an average gap of 31.7% last year.
- On average, the 144 countries covered in the Report have closed 96% of the gap in health outcomes between women and men, unchanged since last year, and more than 95% of the gap in educational attainment, a slight decrease compared to last year. However, the gaps between women and men on economic participation and political empowerment remain wide: only 58% of the economic participation gap has been closed—a second consecutive year of reversed progress and the lowest value measured by the Index since 2008—and about 23% of the political gap, unchanged since last year against a long-term trend of slow but steady improvement.
- Despite this overall mixed picture and continued stalling of progress at the global level, the situation is more nuanced at the regional and country level. Out of the 142 countries covered by the Index both this year and last year, 82 countries have increased their overall gender gap score compared to last year, while 60 have seen it decrease. By contrast, last year’s Report found negative outcomes in more than half of countries surveyed. Moreover, as detailed in the Report, a number of countries and regions have crossed symbolic milestones on the path to gender parity for the first time this year.
- Although this year’s edition of the Global Gender Gap Index sees no new entrants to its top 10 list, there have been notable rank changes. The top spots continue to be held by smaller Western European countries, particularly the Nordics that occupy the top three positions, with two countries from the East Asia and the Pacific region, one country from the Sub-Saharan Africa region, one country from the Latin America and the Caribbean region, and one country from the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region also represented. All but three countries in the Index top 10 have now crossed the threshold of closing more than 80% of their overall gender gap—up from five both last year and in 2015.
- At a global level, in 2017 four regions have a remaining gender gap of less than 30%—two of which are crossing this threshold for the first time this year. Western Europe records a remaining gender gap of 25%, placing it ahead of North America, with a gap of 28%, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with a gap of 29%, and Latin America and the Caribbean, with a gap of 29.8%. The East Asia and the Pacific region ranks ahead of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a remaining gender gap of 31.7% and 32.4%, respectively, and South Asia, with a gap of 34%. The Middle East and North Africa region, for the first time this year, crosses the threshold of having a remaining gender gap of slightly less than 40%.
- On current trends, the overall global gender gap can be closed in exactly 100 years across the 106 countries covered since the inception of the Report, compared to 83 years last year. The most challenging gender gaps remain in the economic and health spheres. Given the continued widening of the economic gender gap, it will now not be closed for another 217 years. However, the education–specific gender gap could be reduced to parity within the next 13 years. The political dimension currently holds the widest gender gap and is also the one exhibiting the most progress, despite a slowdown in progress this year. It could be closed within 99 years. The health gender gap is larger than it stood in 2006.
- While all world regions record a narrower gender gap than they did 11 years ago, more efforts will continue to be needed to accelerate progress. At the current rate of progress, the overall global gender gap can be closed in 61 years in Western Europe, 62 years in South Asia, 79 years in Latin America and the Caribbean, 102 years in Sub-Saharan Africa, 128 years in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 157 years in the Middle East and North Africa, 161 years in East Asia and the Pacific, and 168 years in North America.
- • A variety of models and empirical studies have suggested that improving gender parity may result in significant economic dividends, which vary depending on the situation of different economies and the specific challenges they are facing. Notable recent estimates suggest that economic gender parity could add an additional US$250 billion to the GDP of the United Kingdom, US$1,750 billion to that of the United States, US$550 billion to Japan’s, US$320 billion to France’s and US$310 billion to the GDP of Germany. Other recent estimates suggest that China could see a US$2.5 trillion GDP increase from gender parity and that the world as a whole could increase global GDP by US$5.3 trillion by 2025 by closing the gender gap in economic participation by 25% over the same period.
- A key avenue for further progress is the closing of occupational gender gaps. These gaps often reflect a myriad set of factors that require adjustments within the education sector, within companies and by policymakers. In a research collaboration with LinkedIn, the Report finds that men are distinctively underrepresented in Education and Health and Welfare, while women are strongly under-represented in Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction and Information, Communication and Technology. Fair returns to skills and the availability of deeper talent pools are disrupted by existing gender biases—and the fields most affected, such as the care economy and the emerging technology sector, are losing out on the benefits of diversity.
