Middle East lags in closing gender gap

The World Economic Forum's latest Gender Gap Index has been released, and the news is not good for the Middle East, although there are some encouraging signs.

Gender-based inequality is a phenomenon that affects the majority of the world's cultures, religions, nations and income groups. The Global Gender Gap Index, introduced last year, aims to be a tool for bench-marking and tracking global gender-based inequalities on economic, political, education- and health-based criteria.

The report uses hard data collected from NGOs and other world organisations to measure the size of the gender gap in four areas of inequality between men and women. These are: Economic participation and opportunity-inlcuding salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment; educational attainment-inlcuding access to basic and higher level education Political empowerment-inlcuding representation in government; health and survival -including life expectancy and number of men versus women.

The Global Gender Gap Index scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the gap between women and men that has been closed, with the top scoring countries having the smallest gap.

Israel (36) continues to hold the top spot in the Middle East and North Africa region, due to higher-than-average performances on economic participation, educational attainment and political empowerment. Relative to last year, Israel's scores on economic participation improved: women's labour force participation rates increased relative to those of men, as did women's estimated earned income.

Kuwait (96) remains the second-highest ranking country in the region, followed by Tunisia (102), Syria (103), Jordan (104), the United Arab Emirates (105), Algeria (108), Qatar (109), Bahrain (115), Oman (119), Egypt (120), Morocco (122), Saudia Arabia (124) and Yemen (128).

Most Arab world countries not only continue to perform far below the global average, but also do not show much improvement over the last year, or have deteriorated. The exceptions are some of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

The United Arab Emirates had significant improvements on both economic participation and political empowerment. Wage inequality for similar work decreased, and the gap between women and men's estimated earned income also diminished.

The GCC economies have invested large amounts of resources in increasing women's education levels over the last decade, but will need to better integrate these women into the economy to reap the benefits of this investment.

Egypt's minor improvements on economic participation are offset by drops in both its health and education scores. In Morocco, the gap on estimated earned income worsened, as did the gap between women and men in goevernment, and the gap between the number of women and men currently enrolled in tertiary education.

Saudi Arabia shows minor improvements on labour force participation rates of women, and the number of women enrolled in tertiary education also shows positive increases over the previous years study. However, Saudi Arabia remains the lowest ranking country in the region on political empowerment.

Yemen (128) continues to occupy not only the last place in the region, but also the last place in the overall rankings of the 128 countries, having closed only around 45% of its gender gap.

Figures provided by Heidrick&Struggles Mapping Global Talent

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