Asia closing 37.2% of the gender gap and North America closing more than double. Regions continue to have the most significant gaps in the Political Empowerment subindex, with only Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Europe recording more than 35% parity. Eurasia and Central Asia At 69% parity, Eurasia and Central Asia ranks 4th out of the eight regions on the overall Gender Gap Index. Based on the aggregated scores of the constant sample of countries included since 2006, the parity score since the 2020 edition has stagnated, although there has been an improvement of 3.2 percentage points since 2006. Moldova, Belarus and Armenia are the highest- ranking countries in the region, while Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Türkiye rank the lowest. The difference in parity between the highest- and the lowest-ranked country is 14.9 percentage points. At the current rate of progress, it will take 167 years for the Eurasia and Central Asia region to reach gender parity. Regional gender parity on Economic Participation and Opportunity has been steadily increasing. Overall, 68.8% of the gender gap has closed, which is a 0.5 percentage-point improvement since the last edition. Six out of 10 countries, led by Moldova, Belarus and Azerbaijan, have at least 70% parity on this subindex. All countries in the region except Kyrgyzstan have made varying degrees of progress since the 2022 edition, with Moldova and Armenia making the most progress. Furthermore, all countries in the region have advanced towards parity in estimated earned income. Türkiye and Tajikistan demonstrate the least parity on Economic Participation and Opportunity, with Türkiye being the only country that has closed less than 60% of the gap on this subindex. Eight out of 10 countries have more than 99% parity on the Educational Attainment subindex, resulting in 98.9% parity for the region. Türkiye and Ukraine, the region’s two most populous countries, have a persistent disparity in secondary enrolment. Barring Türkiye and Tajikistan, all countries have attained parity in enrolment in tertiary education. At 97.4% parity, Eurasia and Central Asia has only three out of 10 countries that have less than 97% parity for the Health and Survival subindex. Azerbaijan and Armenia, home to more than 13 million people combined, have some of the lowest sex ratios at birth in the world. Finally, seven out of the 10 countries have reached parity in healthy life expectancy. Compared to other regions, Eurasia and Central Asia has the lowest gender parity in Political Empowerment and suffers a 1 percentage-point setback since 2022. Its score of 10.9% is barely half the global score of 22.1%. Only Armenia, Ukraine and Tajikistan have made at least a 1 percentage- point improvement. While more than one-fifth of ministers in Moldova and Ukraine are women, Azerbaijan continues to be one of the handful countries with a male-only cabinet. Further, five of the 10 countries in the region have more than 25% women parliamentarians. With female presidents in Georgia and Moldova, there has been some improvement in female head-of-state representation in the last 50 years. East Asia and the Pacific East Asia and Pacific is at 68.8% parity, marking the fifth-highest score out of the eight regions. Progress towards parity has been stagnating for over a decade and the region registers a 0.2 percentage- point decline since the last edition. While 11 out of 19 countries improve, one stays the same and eight (including China, the world’s second-most populous country) recede on the overall index. New Zealand, the Philippines and Australia have the highest parity at the regional level, with Australia and New Zealand also being the two most-improved economies in the region. On the other hand, Fiji, Myanmar and Japan are at the bottom of the list, with Fiji, Myanmar and Timor-Leste registering the highest declines. At the current rate of progress, it will take 189 years for the region to reach gender parity. Compared to the last edition, six out of 19 countries improved on the Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex, depleting the regional parity score by 1.1% to 71.1%. Nine out of 17 countries that have the data have shown drops in the share of women in senior official positions. However, 13 out of 19 countries improved parity in estimated earned income since the last edition. Overall, Lao PDR, the Philippines and Singapore register the highest parity for the subindex and Fiji, Timor-Leste and Japan register the lowest. At 95.5%, East Asia and the Pacific has the second-lowest score on the Educational Attainment subindex compared to other regions. Malaysia and New Zealand are at full parity, along with nine other countries in the region, with more than 99% scores. China, Lao PDR and Indonesia, with more than 1.7 billion people, have the lowest parity. Cambodia and Thailand are the only countries in this region with more than 1 percentage-point increase in parity over 2022. Thailand improves parity in enrolment in secondary education while Cambodia improves on literacy rate and enrolment in primary and tertiary education. On the Health and Survival subindex, Singapore attains gender parity in sex ratio at birth, joining seven other countries across the world with the same achievement. However, 11 out of 19 countries saw declining parity in sex ratio. This contributes to the region’s slight depletion of parity on this subindex, by 0.02% to 94.9%. Global Gender Gap Report 2023 21

GGGR 2023