The results are in. The World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Index on Wednesday, ranking 145 countries on gender equality.
The global headline figure? Full parity is now 120 years away, meaning we’ll have to wait until 2146.
And that assumes progress actually continues. Before the pandemic, the same index declared parity was 99.5 years away.
And that’s if we manage to get things right on climate action (which has serious gendered implications globally) as well as AI job displacement, AI-related threats to safety (although one such threat includes extinction, which can’t do much to threaten gender equality), as well as rollbacks on gender equality efforts and the continued rise of far-right parties and governments globally.
So here’s the progress: the gender gap now stands at 69.2 per cent closed, which is up 0.4 percentage points over the last year. Nothing dramatic, but something.
One of the biggest gains since 2006 has been political empowerment for women, but such progress has actually reversed since 2016. The share of world economies that are led by women peaked in 2022 and has now fallen back to 2016 levels.
Leadership has stalled, with women’s share of top-level management averaging under 30 per cent across 62 economies since 2024. Women’s share of new hires into such roles has fallen every year since 2022, now at 32.3 per cent.
Women are underrepresented in technology leadership positions. Holding under one in five chief information officer positions and one in 10 chief technology officer roles.
And only one in 10 ministerial portfolios held by women is considered to by high influence — a share that has remained mostly unchanged since 2008.
Meanwhile, the report identified AI as the new frontier of the gap, with women accounting for fewer than one in five AI engineers and being underrepresented at every level in AI firms.
Australia cracked the top ten for the first time ever, which we’ve written about here.
Iceland continued to take pole position, followed by Finland in second, Norway in third, and Namibia in 4th. The United Kingdom fell one place to 5th, while New Zealand fell one place to 6th.
At the other end of the scale, Chad was listed in last (No. 145) place, below Iran, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Algeria.
The United States continued its downward trajectory, dropping to 47th place.
Bangladesh dropped 55 places to 79th, Peru dropped 37 places to 94th, and Cape Verde dropped 39 places to 69th.
The biggest improver, according to the global ranking, was Kenya, up 33 spots to 65th place, followed by Ghana, up 32 to 56th place, and Guatemala, up 31 to 50th place.
It helps to consider what’s behind these countries’ gains. For Ghana, cracking the top 60 appears to come almost entirely from economic empowerment, now ranking first in the world for women’s economic participation. It still ranks 116th for political empowerment, demonstrating how women can be equally engaged in the economy but almost entirely absent from power.
Guatemala meanwhile ranks first for health and survival and 41st for political empowerment, and it’s one of just nine economies to have closed at least 12 points of its gap since 2006.
And as always, it helps to look at what results in dramatic falls. Those that fall hardest and fastest do so because of politics, whether that’s a dissolved parliament, a change of government or a significant cabinet reshuffle. And as the WEF means,