Wednesday, 29 October 2014 00:00
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SRI LANKA has been ranked 79th out of 142 countries in gender equality, dropping significantly from the 59th position last year. Since 2006, when the Global Gender Gap Report was published, the island has slid from the overall 13th rank on reducing economic participation and political representation.
Overall, the report estimates that the world will take 81 years for to close the gender gap. While women are rapidly closing the gender gap with men in areas like health and education, inequality at work is not expected to be erased until 2095, according to a report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Sri Lanka has been seeing mixed results with key economic indicators still failing to impress. For example, the female adult employment rate at 6.2% is almost three times higher than its male counterpart of 2.8%, only 31% of women are employed in non-agricultural sectors and fewer women have bank accounts.
Even in the private sector, only 9% of local firms have women as top managers and only 26% have female participation in ownership. The ability of women to rise to positions of enterprise leadership was also seen as moderately positive.
Sri Lanka’s best score was seen in health and survival, showing policies have failed to push progress fast enough in other key areas such as political representation and involvement at policymaking levels.
Around the world since 2006, when the WEF first began issuing its annual Global Gender Gap Reports, women have seen their access to economic participation and opportunity inch up to 60% of that of men’s, from 56%. The report, which covered 142 countries, looked at how nations distribute access to healthcare, education, political participation and resources and opportunities between women and men.
Almost all the countries had made progress towards closing the gap in access to healthcare, with 35 nations filling it completely, while 25 countries had shut the education access gap, the report showed.
Even more than in the workplace, political participation lagged stubbornly behind, with women still accounting for just 21% of the world’s decision makers. Yet this was the area where most progress had been made in recent years.
In the case of politics, globally, there are now 26% more female parliamentarians and 50% more female ministers than nine years ago. The five Nordic countries, led by Iceland, clearly remained the most gender-equal.
They were joined by Nicaragua, Rwanda, Ireland, the Philippines and Belgium in the top 10, while Yemen remained at the bottom of the chart for the ninth year in a row.
The United States meanwhile climbed three spots from last year to 20th, after narrowing its wage gap and hiking the number of women in parliamentary and ministerial level positions. France catapulted from 45th to 16th place, also due to a narrowing wage gap but mainly thanks to increasing numbers of women in politics, including near-parity in the number of government ministers. With 49% women ministers, France now has one of the highest ratios in the world.
Britain meanwhile dropped eight spots to 26th place, amid changes in income estimates. Among other large economies, Brazil stood at 71st place, Russia at 75th, China at 87th and India at 114.
