Qatar’s lower overall ranking is driven by relatively lower parity in terms of healthy life expectancy. Though in most countries women tend to outlive men, in five Middle Eastern and North African countries (Morocco, 99.9%; Bahrain, 99.3%; Algeria, 99%; Jordan, 98.7%; Qatar, 95.5%), one from Sub-Saharan Africa (Mali, 99.3%) and two from Southern Asia (Pakistan, 99.9%, and Afghanistan, 97.1%), the reverse is true. For Viet Nam, Azerbaijan, India and China, the relatively low overall rankings on the Health and Survival subindex is explained by skewed sex ratios at birth. Compared to top scoring countries that register a 94.4% gender parity at birth, the indicator stands at 92.7% for India (albeit an improvement over last edition) and below 90% for Viet Nam, China and Azerbaijan. Finally, the Political Empowerment subindex registers once again the largest gender gap, at only 22.1% of the gap closed and the greatest spread of scores across countries. Iceland stands out as best performer, with a 90.1% parity score, which is 13.6 percentage points greater than the country ranking second (Norway) and 69 percentage points above the median global score (21.1%). In addition to the first two ranked, only 10 other countries out of the 146 included this year score above the 50% parity score: New Zealand (72.5%), Finland (70%), Germany (63.4%), Nicaragua (62.6%), Bangladesh (55.2%), Mozambique (54.2%), Rwanda (54.1%), Costa Rica (52.4%), Sweden (51.2%) and Chile (50.2%). The lowest parity scores are found for: Myanmar (4.7%), Nigeria (4.1%), Iran (3.1%), Lebanon (2.1%), Vanuatu (0.6%) and Afghanistan (0%). Iceland and Bangladesh are the only countries where women have held the highest political position in a country for a higher number of years than men. In 67 other countries, women have never served as head of state in the past 50 years. In terms of the share of women in ministerial positions, 11 out of 146 countries, led by Albania, Finland and Spain, have 50% or more ministers who are women. However, 75 countries have 20% or less female ministers. Further, populous countries such as India, Türkiye and China have less than 7% ministers who are women and countries like Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon have none. As regards to parity in the number of seats in national parliaments, five countries stand at full parity: Mexico, Nicaragua, Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates and (as of this year’s edition) New Zealand. The countries with the least representation of women in parliament (less than 5%) are Maldives (4.8% of the gender gap closed), Qatar (4.6%), Nigeria (3.7%), Oman (2.4%) and Vanuatu (1.9%). Though still below the 40% parity threshold, Benin and Malta saw the largest improvements for this indicator, experiencing a rise of 26.6 and 23.2 percentage points, respectively. Global Gender Gap Report 2023 14

GGGR 2023