View India's Gender Gap Report ranking as a warning

The Hindu

11-07-2025

India is now a global economic power, a digital innovator, and home to the world's largest youth population. But the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report (2025) is a sobering reminder that when it comes to gender equality, India remains far behind.
Structural issues
India ranks 131 out of 148 countries, with particularly low scores in economic participation and health and survival — the pillars essential for meaningful gender parity. These are not just social indicators. They are signs of a structural failure holding back national progress.
Despite progress in educational attainment, India continues to struggle in ensuring women's health and autonomy. The report shows that India's sex ratio at birth remains among the most skewed in the world, reflecting a persistent son preference. The healthy life expectancy for women is now lower than men's.
Such outcomes point to chronic neglect in reproductive health, preventive care and nutrition, especially for women from lower-income and rural backgrounds. Increased Budget allocations for health, especially at the primary care level, are a necessity to improve women's well-being and their access to basic services, such as education and health care. Without good health, economic inclusion becomes impossible. Nearly 57% of Indian women in the 15 to 49 age group are anaemic — as reported by National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 — which reduces their ability to learn, work, or carry pregnancies safely. Such a widespread and correctable issue is emblematic of the broader failure to treat women's health as a national development priority.
India ranks 143rd on the Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex. Women continue to earn less than a third of what men do, and female labour force participation remains stubbornly low. The McKinsey Global Institute, in 2015, had projected that closing gender gaps could add $770 billion to India's GDP by 2025. Yet, in 2025, India appears to have lost out on the opportunity. At the current pace of progress, it may take over a century to close the global economic gender gap — and India lags behind even that trajectory.
A sidelining
This is not just about employment numbers. Women remain busy in informal and subsistence work and are grossly under-represented in decision-making spaces — from boardrooms to budget committees. The result is a policy ecosystem that repeatedly sidelines women's lived realities. The burden of unpaid care work continues to be a major drag on women's time and agency. Indian women perform nearly seven times more unpaid domestic work than men, as highlighted by the Time Use Survey. Yet, this critical labour remains invisible in national accounting and underfunded in public policy.
Investing in care infrastructure such as childcare centres, elder care services and maternity benefits would not only ease this burden but also enable millions of women to enter or re-enter the workforce. The vacuum in these services reflects both a gender and an economic blind spot.
Central and State governments must begin to account for unpaid care work in their economic and social policy frameworks through time-use surveys, gender budgeting, and direct investment in care infrastructure. India can look to countries such as Uruguay and South Korea, which have begun integrating care economies into their development plans, with positive results.
Supporting senior citizens
India is at a demographic turning point. While it continues to draw benefits from a young population, its percentage of senior citizens is expected to nearly double by 2050, reaching close to 20% of the population. This demographic shift will predominantly comprise very old women, especially widows, who often experience high dependency. At the same time, fertility rates have already fallen below replacement level, as noted in the NFHS-5. This means that the working-age population will shrink and the care needs of the elderly will rise. The only way to sustain economic growth in this context is to ensure women — half the population — are healthy, supported, and economically active. Gender equality is no longer just a rights issue. It is a demographic and economic necessity.
If women continue to exit or be excluded from the workforce, the dependency ratio will rise even faster, placing greater strain on fewer workers and undermining fiscal stability. Reversing this trend demands integrated policies that connect health, labour and social protection.
India does not lack frameworks or ambition — the slogans are there. What is required is real investment: in public health systems that prioritise women's needs; in care services that redistribute unpaid work, and in policies that see women not as beneficiaries, but as builders of the economy.
The Global Gender Gap Report is not just a ranking. It is a warning: unless India treats gender equality as central to its economic and demographic future, it risks squandering the gains it has worked so hard to achieve.
Poonam Muttreja is the Executive Director at Population Foundation of India. Martand Kaushik is Senior Specialist—Media and Communications at Population Foundation of India