Brazil rises in gender equality ranking, says World Economic Forum – 06/20/2023 – Market

Brazil improved significantly in the ranking of countries with better gender parity, jumping from the 94th position in 2022 to the 57th, according to the new Global Gender Gap report, released this Wednesday (21) by the World Economic Forum.

On the scale from 0 to 1 used by the study, the Brazilian index is at 0.726 points, with 1 meaning no difference between men and women. Last year, the country had 0.696 points.

The overall index is a simple average of four criteria that compare differences between genders, namely: economic participation and opportunity (0.670), educational opportunity (0.992), access to health care (0.980) and political empowerment (0.263).

As can be seen, there is very little disparity in access to health and schooling between men and women in Brazil, according to the study. In the case of health, the 0.980 points put the country in first place, alongside 25 other nations. But women’s economic participation leaves something to be desired.

Much worse is the case of political empowerment, that is, the lack of women working in the area, which lowers the Brazilian average. Even so, it was the criterion in which Brazil improved the most, practically doubling the 0.136 points achieved in last year’s study.

In the ranking of 146 countries, Brazil is just behind Croatia and Bolivia and ahead of Panama and Bangladesh. The first are Iceland (0.912 points), Norway (0.879) and Finland (0.863). Last is Afghanistan, with 0.405 points, well below the penultimate placed,

In addition to listing the countries in these criteria, the report also makes an exercise in futurology, calculating when the gender disparity will disappear from the planet, if everything continues to evolve as it is. It will be in the year 2154, says the World Economic Forum.

There are 131 years until then and, in last year’s study, the calculation predicted 132 years. In other words, gender parity advances at a slow pace. Between 2022 and 2023, it improved by just 0.3% globally. Since the first report, in 2006, it has advanced 4.1%.

Even so, there is progress compared to the pandemic years. According to the report, the parity has only now returned to pre-Covid-19 levels.

According to the document, “the overall progress in 2023 is due, in part, to the improvement in closing the gap in educational level, with 117 of the 146 countries indexed already closing at least 95% of this gap. Meanwhile, the gap in participation and economic opportunity was eliminated by 60.1% and the political empowerment gap by only 22.1%.”

“While there have been encouraging signs of recovery to pre-pandemic levels, women continue to bear the brunt of the current cost of living crisis and labor market disruptions,” said Saadia Zahidi, executive director of the World Economic Forum. “An economic recovery requires the full power of creativity and diversity of ideas and skills. We cannot afford to miss out on economic participation and opportunities for women.”

By region, Latin America and the Caribbean appears to have overcome 74.3% of its overall gender gap, recording a 1.7 percentage point increase in overall gender parity since last year.

In first place are Europe (76.3%) and then North America (75%). The Middle East and North Africa remains the region furthest from parity, with 62.6% of the gender gap closed.