Pakistan is among the worst performers in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2023, and was ranked 142 among 146 countries.

In the report, which tracks progress on closing gender gaps, only four countries - Iran, Algeria, Chad and Afghanistan - fared lower than Pakistan.

“Pakistan (142nd) is at 57.5% parity, its highest since 2006,” said the report.

“It has improved by 5.1 percentage points on the Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex in the last decade to attain 36.2% parity, though this level of parity remains one of the lowest globally,” it added.

The WEF report noted that Pakistan has made progress across all indicators on this subindex, particularly in the share of women technical workers and the achievement of parity in wage equality for similar work.

“Despite relatively high disparities, parity in literacy rate and enrolment in secondary and tertiary education are gradually advancing, leading to 82.5% parity on the Educational Attainment subindex.

“On Health and Survival, Pakistan secures parity in sex ratio at birth, boosting subindex parity by 1.7 percentage points since 2022,” it said.

The report pointed out that like most other countries, Pakistan’s widest gender gap is on Political Empowerment (15.2%).

“It has had a female head of state for 4.7 years of the last 50 years, and one-tenth of the ministers, as well as one-fifth of parliamentarians, are women,” it said.

Globally, the report found that the overall gender gap has closed by 0.3 percentage points compared with last year’s edition.

Progress is partly due to improvement in closing the educational attainment gap, with 117 out of 146 indexed countries now having closed at least 95% of the gap, it noted.

Meanwhile, the economic participation and opportunity gap has closed by 60.1% and the political empowerment gap by just 22.1%.

Regionally, Southern Asia achieved 63.4% gender parity, the second-lowest score of the eight regions.

“The score has risen by 1.1 percentage points since the last edition on the basis of the constant sample of countries covered since 2006, which can be partially attributed to the rise in scores of populous countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh,” said the report.

It found that Southern Asia has the largest economic participation and opportunity gender gap (37.2%) of all regions though there has been an improvement of 1.4 percentage points since the last edition.