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Report Home

<Previous Next>
    • How to Read the Country Profiles
  • The Global Gender Gap Index 2020 Rankings
  • Shareable Infographics
  • Press Release
  • Preface
  • Key Findings
  • The Global Gender Gap Index 2020
    • Global Results
    • Performance by Subindex
    • Progress over Time
    • Performance by Region
    • Selected Country Performances
    • Conclusion
    • Box 1: Progress towards gender equality in wages, where do we stand?
    • Box 2: Closing the Gender Gap Country Accelerators
  • The Future of Gender Parity
    • Box 3: Hardwiring gender parity in the future of work
  • Appendix A: Regional Classifications
  • Appendix B: The Global Gender Gap Index: Methodology and Technical Notes
  • Contributors and Acknowledgements
  • Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society Business Partners
Home Previous Next
Home Previous Next
Home Previous Next
  • Report Home
    • How to Read the Country Profiles
  • The Global Gender Gap Index 2020 Rankings
  • Shareable Infographics
  • Press Release
  • Preface
  • Key Findings
  • The Global Gender Gap Index 2020
    • Global Results
    • Performance by Subindex
    • Progress over Time
    • Performance by Region
    • Selected Country Performances
    • Conclusion
    • Box 1: Progress towards gender equality in wages, where do we stand?
    • Box 2: Closing the Gender Gap Country Accelerators
  • The Future of Gender Parity
    • Box 3: Hardwiring gender parity in the future of work
  • Appendix A: Regional Classifications
  • Appendix B: The Global Gender Gap Index: Methodology and Technical Notes
  • Contributors and Acknowledgements
  • Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society Business Partners

Conclusion

Share

The Global Gender Gap Report 2020 provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of the global gender gap and of efforts and insights to close it. The index offers a benchmarking tool to track progress and to reveal best practices across countries and subjects. This year the report finds that the gender gap has closed slightly since last year, yet it will still require 99.5 years to achieve full parity at the current pace.

The report also highlights wide performance variation across countries that are due to a diverse array of underlying factors. The report’s detailed Country Profiles and online Data Explorer tool—available on the report website (https://wef-gender-gap.netlify.com/)—not only allow users to understand how close each country has come to the equality benchmark in each of the four subindexes, but also provide a snapshot of the legal and social framework within which these outcomes are produced.

The report continues to highlight the strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its economic performance and summarizes some of the latest research on the case for gender equality. This year, the report introduces a deeper analysis of gender gaps across industries and the role of gender-based occupational and skills imbalances. The report highlights the message to policy-makers that countries that want to remain competitive and inclusive will need to make gender equality a critical part of their nation’s human capital development. In particular, learning between countries and public-private cooperation within countries will be critical elements of closing the gender gap. 

The information contained in the Global Gender Gap Report series hopefully serves as a basis for continued benchmarking by countries on their progress towards gender equality, to help support the case for closing gender gaps and to encourage further research on policies and practices that are effective at promoting change. Based on this information, the World Economic Forum also engages in country-level action, which takes place through various regional activities, including the “country-accelerator” project described in Box 2

References

Albanesi, S. Changing Business Cycles: The Role of Women’s Employment (CEPR Discussion Paper 13578), Center for Economic Policy and Research, 2019.

Blau, F. and L. Kahn, The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations (NBER Working Paper No. 21913), National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016, http://www.nber.org/papers/w21913.

Chaaban, J. and W. Cunningham, Measuring the Economic Gain of Investing in Girls: The Girl Effect Dividend (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper), World Bank, 2011.

Coale, A., “Excess Female Mortality and the Balance of the Sexes in the Population: An Estimate of the Number of Missing Females”, Population and Development Review, vol. 17, no. 3, 1991, pp. 517–523.

Flabbi, L., et al., Do Female Executives Make a Difference? The Impact of Female Leadership on Gender Gaps and Firm Performance (IZA Discussion Paper No. 8602), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), 2014.

Fukui, M., E. Nakamura and J. Steinsson, Women, Wealth Effects, and Slow Recoveries (NBER Working Papers No. 25311), National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 2018.

Ghani, E., M. Anandi and S. O’Connell, Can Political Empowerment Help Economic Empowerment? Women Leaders and Female Labor Force Participation in India (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6675), World Bank, 2013.

Greig, F., R. Hausmann, L. D. Tyson and S. Zahidi, “The Gender Gap Index 2006: A New Framework for Measuring Equality” in The Global Gender Gap Report 2006, World Economic Forum, 2006.

Hausmann, R., Learning Without Theory, Project Syndicate, 2016.

Hunt, A. and E. Samman, Women’s Economic Empowerment: Navigating Enablers and Constraints (Research Report), Overseas Development Institute (ODI), 2016.

International Labour Organization (ILO), Economic Impacts of Reducing the Gender Gap (What Works Research Brief No. 10), 2017.

———        , Global Wage Report 2018/19: What lies behind gender pay gaps, 2018.

Inter-Parliamentary Union, Women in Politics, 2019.

Jütting, J., et al., Measuring Gender (In)equality: Introducing the Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base (GID) (Working Paper No. 247), OECD Development Centre, 2006. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/49/36228820.pdf.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), “Cooking and Caring, Building and Repairing”, Society at a Glance 2011, 2011, pp. 9–27.

——— , Gender Equality in Politics in Government at a Glance, 2019.

——— , Comparable Estimates of Average Wages per Full-Time Equivalent Employee, available at http://www.oecd.org/employment/emp/average_wages.pdf. 

Schwab, K., The Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, 2016.

UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), Harnessing the Power of Data for Girls: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead to 2030, 2016.

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Global Assessment of Sex-Disaggregated ICT Employment Statistics: Data Availability and Challenges on Measurement and Compilation (UNCTAD Technical Notes on ICT for Development no. 4), 2016.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), “Technical Notes” in Human Development Report 2015, 2015.

——— , The State of the World’s Children 2009: Maternal and Newborn Health, 2008, http://www.unicef.org/sowc09/docs/SOWC09-FullReport-EN.pdf.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, World Population Prospects, 2017 Revision, 2017.

World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report 2019, 2019.

———             , Accelerating Gender Parity: A Toolkit, 2017.

———            , The Global Gender Gap Report 2018, 2018.

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Selected Country Performances Box 1: Progress towards gender equality in wages, where do we stand?
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