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Global Gender Gap Shrinks But Parity Is Still More Than A Century Away

Global Gender Gap Shrinks But Parity Is Still More Than A Century Away

Forbesa day ago

The gender gap around the world is closing at its fastest pace since before the Covid-19 pandemic. But even at the current rate of progress, full parity is well over a hundred years away, new research reveals.
According to the 19th edition of the World Economic Forum's annual Global Gender Gap Report, the gap across 148 economies around the world now stands at 68.8% when examining factors including economic opportunities, education, health, and political leadership.
When looking at the 145 economies that were examined both this year and last, the gender gap contracted by 0.3 percentage points in 2025—from 68.4% in 2024. That marked the fastest annual contraction since before Covid-19 spread around the world in 2020, stalling or even revering progress on many metrics, such as women's labor force participation, in some countries.
Despite this uptick, however, and based on the WEF's calculations, it will still take 123 years to reach full parity in gender globally, and that's assuming today's pace of progress doesn't slacken.
'The progress made in this edition was driven primarily by significant strides in political empowerment and economic participation, while educational attainment and health and survival maintained near-parity levels above 95%,' the authors of the report write. They add, however, that even though women today represent 41.2% of the global paid workforce, 'a stark leadership gap persists with women holding only 28.8% of top leadership positions.'
The 2025 report showed that, while no economy has yet achieved full gender parity, some are getting closer. For a 16th consecutive year, for example, Iceland led the index with the smallest gender gap of just 92.6%. Indeed, Iceland is the only economy to have closed more than 90% of its gender gap.
The country's northern European neighbors—Finland, Norway and Sweden—have all closed more than 80% of their gap and have also consistently ranked in the top 10 in every edition of the report since 2006. Other countries in this year's top 10 include the United Kingdom, the Republic of Moldova, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and Namibia.
Overall, the authors of the report note that there's a slight correlation between the current income levels of the countries covered and their gender gaps, with richer economies being marginally more gender equal. At the aggregate level, the authors note, economies considered to be high-income have closed 74.3% of their gender gap, which is slightly more than the averages observed across lower income countries. The authors emphasize, however, that this correlation 'is low and does not indicate causation.' In other words, being a high-income nation does not automatically mean that gender gaps are smaller.

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