Indias ease of doing business ranking does little or nothing for its women

Key Highlights

• India has slipped back to its gender gap ranking of two years ago.
• It is the least improved country in Health and Survival of girl children over a decade.
• Iceland ranked first and successfully closed 87% of its gender gap issues.

When it comes to gender equality and economic opportunity for all India ranked 108th, behind countries like Ghana (72), Kenya (76) and even Bangladesh (47), a report by World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed on Thursday.

WEF termed it as ‘least improved country’ in a decade in matters of 'Health and Survival.' With this gender gap ranking India has slipped back into its same ranking two years ago in 2015.

“India (108) experiences a decline in its overall Global Gender Gap Index ranking, largely attributable to a widening of its gender gaps in Political Empowerment as well as in healthy life expectancy and basic literacy,” the report said.

“It (India) continues to rank fourth-lowest in the world on Health and Survival, remaining the world’s least-improved country on this sub index over the past decade,” the report added.

The country ranked 141 out of 144 countries in terms of health and survival of the girl child.

While India soared 30 places to enter this year’s top 100 countries where it got a little easier to do business, markets cheered on. Sensex touched a ‘life time’ high of 33,600 points while Nifty-50 crossed the 10,400 mark.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley vowed to bring India up to top 50 with more economic reforms.

The ‘ease of doing business’ ranking that takes into account starting business ventures in India as well as ease of paying taxes and trading across state borders.

Yet the initiatives to bring women on par with men in Indian society in matters of educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment are still lacking. India ranked 139, 112, 141 and 15 in the above categories respectively among 144 countries.

While India’s economic participation, educational attainment and political empowerment ratio speaks of female proportion to male in society its ‘health and survival’ ratio speaks of sex ratio at birth (converted to female-over-male ratio).

India scored 0.669 on the global index of gender gap and 0.942 in the health and survival ratio.

The more deviations away from the score 1, the higher the ‘distance to parity’ in the country for that sub index appears to be.

India's women-men wage gap is amongst the worst in the world