As COVID-19 continues to affect lives and livelihoods around the world, we can already see that the pandemic and its economic fallout are having a regressive effect on gender equality. The social evil of Gender inequality has been the truth of our past and present. Working towards denying its existence or rather imbibing the core values of gender equality for the generations to come and paint a brighter future for the tomorrow. Income of women in India is only one-fifth of men’s, revealed the Gender Gap index by World Economic Forum.
In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index released on Wednesday, 31 March, India has fallen 28 spots and ranks 140th among 156 countries on the list. In 2020, India ranked on the 112th spot of the 153 countries. The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting impact on women is likely to have played a role in the further slip.
WHERE DOES INDIA STAND
India has closed 62.5 percent of its gender gap till date, the report said, noting that a significant decline took place in the economic opportunity and participation subindex.According to estimates, income of women in India is only one-fifth of men's, which puts the country among the bottom 10 globally, on this indicator.
"Among the drivers of this decline is a decrease in women's labour force participation rate, which fell from 24.8 percent to 22.3 percent. In addition, the share of women in professional and technical roles declined further to 29.2 percent. The share of women in senior and managerial positions also remains low: Only 14.6 percent of these positions are held by women and there are only 8.9 percent firms with female top managers,"
STEEP FALL IN POLITICAL REPRESENTATION
The report revealed that most of the decline was seen on the Political Empowerment subindex, where India went back 13.5 percentage points. Addition, share of women in Parliament remained stagnant at 14.4 percent and the share of the last 50 years in which a woman has been head of state is 15.5 percent.
BANGLADESH: BEST PERFORMER IN SOUTH ASIA
All of South Asia was the lowest performer on the index after West Asia and North Africa. Bangladesh was the best faring country within the region.
The World Economic Forum’s report also showed that in South Asia, only Bhutan and Nepal had shown progress towards gender parity in 2021.
While not the focus of this piece, interventions to address the economic participation of women must also address broader societal aspects of gender inequality. Indeed, the two go hand in hand, as our previous research has shown. Governments and businesses must therefore consider how to safeguard girls’ education, tackle violence against women, and protect maternal health, to name a few important issues. More data are needed to better understand the links between women in society, women at work, and economic growth—particularly the factors that drive job loss and recovery among women. Some important questions also remain, including how future trends such as automation might amplify or blunt the impact of COVID-19 on women and how the pandemic affects the wages, job security, and benefits of women. Answering such questions could shape future decisions by governments, multilateral organizations, and companies. But our scenarios show that there may not be enough time to ponder these issues. Procrastination is a losing game. The time for action is now.
Even before the pandemic, progress toward gender equality had been uneven
The gender effects of the COVID-19 crisis highlight the uneven progress toward gender equality. Indeed, in the aggregate, progress toward equality in work and society has stayed relatively flat in the five years between 2014 and 2019. In 2014, the global GPS score was 0.60; today, it is 0.61 (on a scale of 0 to 1, where 1 signifies full parity between women and men). Gender equality in work continues to lag behind gender equality in society, with a GPS of 0.52 versus 0.67, respectively. The world has made progress on a few aspects of gender equality, such as maternal mortality, the share of women in professional and technical jobs, and political representation. However, the level of female participation in the labor force is about two-thirds that of men and has hardly budged in that period.
Within this overall picture, countries and regions can vary significantly. India has seen a slight decrease in female labor-force participation in the past five years, for example, while Indonesia has registered a small increase. Even before the coronavirus, our 15 indicators showed that tangible progress toward gender parity had been uneven and that large gender gaps remained across the world. Now, without intervention to address the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on women, there’s a risk that progress could go into reverse. This would not just set back the cause of gender equality but also hold back the global economy. Conversely, taking steps to redress the balance now could improve social and economic outcomes for millions of women globally and help boost economic growth.
The evidence from our research is clear: what is good for greater gender equality is also good for the economy and society as a whole. The COVID-19 pandemic puts that into stark relief and raises some critically important choices: act now to remove barriers to greater female labor-force participation and a bigger role in society and reap the economic and social benefits; delay and still benefit, but to a substantially lesser degree; or allow the disappointing status quo to prevail and slide backward, leaving massive economic opportunity on the table and negatively affecting the lives of millions of women. Parity is powerful. This is the time for policy makers and business leaders to step up and make it a reality..
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