India Ranks 113 in World Bank's Gender Equality Index, Shows Slight Improvement

Lucknow- Ahead of International Women's Day, the World Bank has released a ranking, the revelations of which may provide the government with something to pat its back while exposing the skewed dynamics of the gender equation in India.

According to the 10th edition of the Women, Business and Law index, India ranks 113 out of 190 countries in the Index. The index measures the gender gap for women in the workplace. The rankings, which might appear abysmal, are in fact a slight improvement from 129 out of 190 countries in the index. The index measures performance on legal frameworks across 10 critical parameters like pay, safety, mobility, entrepreneurship, assets, etc. The addition of Safety and childcare as indicators in the new index is believed to have improved India’s ranking slightly.

The index shows that in India, women enjoy 60% of the legal rights compared to men, which is lower than the global average of 64.2%, but much higher than the 45.9% of the legal protections compared to men.

Over the years, India’s score has remained constant at 74.4%, whereas a total of 14 countries around the world, including Denmark, Canada, and Finland, score a perfect 100 in the legal framework score. Some of the less developed countries like Ethiopia, Namibia, and even Burundi have better scores than India,” The report revealed.

The report reveals that India’s performance is much lower in providing supportive frameworks, such as programs, services, budgets, procedures, inspections, and sanctions for non-compliance with quality standards. Only 54.2% of the supportive frameworks needed were established in the country, the report revealed, although the global weightage in this regard was much lower at 39.5%. Furthermore, no economy has achieved complete legal equality for women.

Other critical findings of the report are:

• Women spend an average of 2.4 more hours a day on unpaid care work than men—much of it on the care of children.

• Only 62 economies—fewer than a third—have quality standards governing childcare services, which has an adverse impact on the employment opportunity of women as mothers with young children have their battles to pick.

• Women face hindrances in areas such as entrepreneurship as just one in every five economies mandate gender-sensitive criteria for public procurement processes, meaning women are deprived of significant economic opportunities.

"Women have the power to turbocharge the sputtering global economy,” said Indermit Gill, Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. “Yet, all over the world, discriminatory laws and practices prevent women from working or starting businesses on an equal footing with men."

Tea Trumbic, the Manager for the Women, Business and the Law project in the World Bank and lead author of the report, said, “Today, barely half of women participate in the global workforce, compared with nearly three out of every four men. This is not just unfair—it’s wasteful. Increasing women's economic participation is the key to amplifying their voices and shaping decisions that affect them directly. Countries simply cannot afford to sideline half of their population.”

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