GGGR 2025

Global Gender Gap Report 202572The four subindexes The Global Gender Gap Index examines the gap between men and women across four fundamental categories (subindexes): Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Table B.1 displays all four of these subindexes and the 14 indicators that compose them, along with the sources of data used for each. Economic Participation and Opportunity This subindex contains three concepts: the participation gap, the remuneration gap and the advancement gap. The participation gap is captured using the difference between women and men in labour-force participation rates. The remuneration gap is captured through a hard data indicator (ratio of estimated female-to-male earned income) 2 and a qualitative indicator gathered through the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion Survey (wage equality for similar work). 3 Finally, the gap between the advancement of women and men is captured through two hard data statistics (the ratio of women to men among legislators, senior officials and managers, and the ratio of women to men among technical and professional workers). Educational Attainment This subindex captures the gap between women’s and men’s current access to education through the enrolment ratios of women to men in primary-, secondary- and tertiary-level education. A longer-term view of the country’s ability to educate women and men in equal numbers is captured through the ratio of women’s literacy rate to men’s literacy rate. Health and Survival This subindex provides an overview of the differences between women’s and men’s health using two indicators. The first is the sex ratio at birth, which aims specifically to capture the phenomenon of “missing women”, prevalent in countries with a strong son preference. 4 Second, we use the gap between women’s and men’s healthy life expectancy. This measure provides an estimate of the number of years that women and men can expect to live in good health by accounting for the years lost to violence, disease, malnutrition and other factors. Political Empowerment This subindex measures the gap between men and women at the highest level of political decision-making through the ratio of women to men in ministerial positions and the ratio of women to men in parliamentary positions. In addition, the index includes the ratio of women to men in terms of years in executive office (prime minister or president) for the last 50 years. Differences between the participation of women and men at local levels of government are currently not captured. Should such data become available at a globally comparative level in future years, it will be considered for inclusion in the index.Section B: Construction of the index The Global Gender Gap Index is constructed using a four-step process, outlined below. Some of the indicators listed in Table B2 require specific standardization or modification to be used in the index. For further information on the indicator-specific calculations, please refer to Section C of this appendix. Step 1. Convert to ratios: Initially, all data is converted to female-to-male ratios. For example, a country with 20% of ministerial positions represented by women is assigned a ratio of 20 women to 80 men, thus a value of 0.25. This is to ensure that the index is capturing gaps between women and men’s attainment levels, rather than the levels themselves. Step 2. Data truncation at parity benchmark: The ratios obtained above are truncated at the “equality benchmark”. For all indicators, except the two health indicators, the equality benchmark is set at 1, meaning equal numbers of women and men. In the case of sex ratio at birth, the equality benchmark is set at 0.944, 5 and in the case of healthy life expectancy the equality benchmark is set at 1.06 to capture that fact that women tend to naturally live longer than men. As such, parity is considered as achieved if, on average, women live five years longer than men. 6 Truncating the data at the equality benchmarks for each assigns the same score to a country that has reached parity between women and men and one where women have surpassed men. The type of rating scale chosen determines whether the index is rewarding women’s empowerment or gender equality. 7 To capture gender equality, two possible scales were considered. One was a negative-positive scale capturing the size and direction of the gender gap. This scale penalizes either men’s advantage over women or women’s advantage over men and gives the highest points to absolute equality. The second choice was a one-sided scale that measures how close women are to reaching parity with men but does not reward or penalize countries for having a gender gap in the other direction. We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes, as it does not reward countries for having exceeded the parity benchmark. However, disparities in either direction are recorded in the Economy Profiles. Step 3. Calculation of subindex scores: Each of the four subindexes is computed as the weighted average of the underlying individual indicators. Averaging the different indicators would implicitly give more weight to the measure that exhibits the largest variability or standard deviation. We therefore first normalize the indicators by equalizing their standard deviations. For example, within the Educational Attainment subindex, standard deviations for each of the four