HALF A SKY FALLING
A World Economic Forum survey on gender gaps confirms the NFHS findings. India has miserably failed one half of its people: the women
IIndia once again finds itself in an embarrassing and, more importantly, worrying position in the Gender Gap Index report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The 2022 report ranks India almost at the bottom, No. 135, among the 146 countries surveyed. This year’s overall score was 0.629; in past years, India’s gender gap score has oscillated between a low of 0.593 and high of 0.683, while top 10 countries score over 0.8.
The report calculates the gender gap between men and women in four key areas—economic opportunities, education, health and political empowerment. While India is at a decent rank of 48 in terms of political empowerment, it’s at the bottom of the list in health and survival. The WEF report reiterates the contradiction between improved social empowerment of women and their abysmal health indicators, as revealed by the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS) published earlier this year.
The NFHS showed that on several indicators—ownership of property and bank accounts, participation in household decisionmaking, percentage of underage marriage and use of internet/ mobile phone—Indian women have showed tangible improvement in the past six years (201522).
In contrast, the gap in health parameters is growing wider. The share of anaemic women has gone up to 57 per cent in the latest NFHS. The share of obese women is also up, at 24 per cent. Over onefourth of Indian women are diabetic and nearly 40 per cent have high blood pressure. Though NFHS5 revealed a healthy sex ratio of 1,020 women per 1,000 men, India’s record has not improved compared to other countries. Besides, the survey comes with a rider about comparing the trends as “some states and UTs may have smaller sample sizes”.
In education, the WEF survey, based on enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary education, found girls were spending less years in school than boys. Union government data shows the mean years of schooling for girls was 4.7 years in 2018, whereas for boys it was almost double, 8.2 years.
The widest gap between men and women was seen in economic participation and opportunities, not just in India but across the Southeast Asian region. The rankings were based on