Global Gender Gap Report 202537the ministerial representation of women rose from 31.6% to 38.8%. Parliamentary parity, on the other hand, decreased by –10.8 points since the last edition. Germany Placing in the top 10 for the 7th time, Germany ranks 9th overall, falling in both rank (-2) and score (-.6 points) compared to last edition. When the index was first launched in 2006, Germany registered a high parity baseline at 75.2%. Since then, the economy has narrowed its gap by 5 percentage points. Economic Participation and Opportunity is one of the most static index dimensions for Germany, with the economy’s performance slowing down since 2012. In this edition, Germany registers a 68% economic parity score but shows little movement across indicators. Germany maintains parity in technical and professional workers, where women make up a majority of the workers in the category at 51.9%. In comparison, women’s representation in senior economic roles pales slightly, with women holding just under a third of total worker representation (28.6%) compared to men’s 71.4%. Educational Attainment sees a slight improvement, primarily from improvements in secondary education enrolment. In this indicator, enrolment rates went up for both men and women, with a significant increase to the former. Female enrolment shares in tertiary education also increased from the 2024 edition; however, as women already outpace men in this domain beyond the range reflected by the truncated score, there are no changes to parity. Similar to other economies, Germany sees a decrease in healthy life expectancy – part of a three-year downward trajectory beginning in 2021 – compared to men, which brings down its Health and Survival score. In Political Empowerment, gender parity decreases compared to the previous edition by –2.5 points, namely in the parliamentary indicator, after women’s representation in parliament decreases from 35.3% in 2024 to 32.4%. Women’s representation in ministerial positions remains virtually the same as in the 2024 edition. Germany narrows the political gap by +21.4 percentage points over time, yet over the past two editions has fallen short of improving its 2023 score of 63.4%. Ireland Closing the top 10 with a score of 80.1% is Ireland. The European economy registers a slight –0.1 decrease from last year’s score that also contributes to a one-rank drop in the index. Despite this setback, Ireland maintains a largely positive parity dividend, having advanced its position by +6.8 percentage points since 2006 and showing a consistently upwards trajectory towards parity. Consistent with this trend is Ireland’s performance in Economic Participation and Opportunity. Since 2006, Ireland has narrowed its economic gap by +11.5 points. Contributing to this trend is Ireland’s performance over the past year, as it has further narrowed its economic parity gap by +1.8 points, registering a 75.5% score. Ireland maintains parity in professional and technical workers, with female representation improving from 51.9% to 52.5% in one year. Female representation in senior economic roles shows a 1 percentage-point decline, and parity in labour-force participation has also declined due to male values increasing more than women’s. Despite this, Ireland registers its third consecutive annual improvement in parity, placing it on a recovery pathway to reach its best economic parity score of 77.7%, posted in 2015. Ireland achieves full parity in Educational Attainment for the fourth year in a row. There are no significant changes to the parity ratio across indicators in 2025; however, it is worth noting that for both secondary and tertiary enrolment indicators, there has been a decrease in the overall enrolment shares for both men and women. In Political Empowerment, Ireland has moved forward by 16.4 percentage points since 2006 and has nearly closed half of the political parity gap at 48.8%. However, in 2025, Ireland registers a decrease in political parity that lowers its score from the 50.7% it achieved in 2024. The sole indicator contributing to score reduction is women in ministerial positions, which reflects a decline in female ministerial representation from 28.6% to 21.4%. Most populous economies Bangladesh Bangladesh ranks 24th in 2025, recording the largest jump in the global gender gap ranking in one year (up 75 places). Its overall gender parity score rises accordingly, increasing significantly, from 68.9% in 2024 to 77.5% in 2025. The most substantial contributor to this progress has been the performance of the Political Empowerment subindex. The proportion of women in ministerial positions rises from 9.1% to 22.2% between 2024 and 2025. Combined with Bangladesh’s parity in the head-of-state indicator, the economy now ranks 1st in Southern Asia and 3rd globally in the political parity ranking. The Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex is the second key driver of improvement, primarily due to labour-force data revisions, which brings Bangladesh’s economic parity back to its 2023 level. Additionally, Bangladesh has made progress in bridging the gender gap in literacy, with women increasingly catching up to men in literacy rates. Brazil Brazil ranks 72nd in the global ranking, climbing two positions compared to last year. Brazil’s overall gender parity has improved from 71.6% in 2024 to 72.0% in 2025. Over time, Brazil has experienced two significant waves of progress in gender parity. The first occurred between 2006 and the early 2010s, driven primarily by gains in economic parity, which increased from 60.4% in 2006 to around 65.0% in the early 2010s, and to a lesser extent by advances in educational parity, which rose from 97.2% to above 99.0% since 2008. The second wave emerged after 2022, marked by a significant improvement in the Political Empowerment subindex. Between 2022 and 2023, Brazil’s political parity score rose by more than 10 percentage points, reaching over 20% and remaining at that level since. This increase is largely

GGGR 2025