The annual Global Gender Gap Index is an important benchmark for understanding progress toward gender equality in four key areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. It was first published in 2006 by the World Economic Forum and assesses countries on how well they are dividing their resources and opportunities among their male and female populations, regardless of the overall levels of these resources and opportunities.
With 102 countries included, we can look at the dataset to analyze trends over time. Scores on the index range from 0 to 100 and indicate the extent to which the gender gap has closed (in percentage terms). Cross-country comparisons also help identify the most effective policies for achieving gender equality.
In East Asia and the Pacific, the gender parity rate is 68.8 percent, the fifth highest among the eight regions. However, progress towards gender equality in the region has been stagnant for more than a decade and has actually declined by 0.2 percentage points since the previous report. While New Zealand, the Philippines and Australia have the highest levels of parity at the regional level, the region also faces challenges, with Fiji, Myanmar and Japan at the bottom and experiencing significant declines. On current trends, the region is expected to take 189 years to achieve gender parity.
The Philippines achieved gender parity at 79.1%, ranking 16th in the world. While there has been an improvement in the ranking, this is only a partial recovery from the level of parity in 2018. Despite gains in the representation of women ministers in the cabinet (26%), there are still gaps in women parliamentarians (37.6% parity), affecting the overall parity in political empowerment by 0.7 points.
The Philippines is also close to parity in educational attainment (99.9%), but falls behind in health and survival (96.8%). Despite parity in economic participation and opportunity, income inequality remains a concern. In terms of economic participation and opportunity, the Philippines achieves full parity for professional and technical workers, although women's earnings are only 71.6% of men's.
Indonesia, on the other hand, ranked 87th with a parity score of 69.7 percent, almost the same as last year's parity level. In terms of economic participation and opportunity, there was a partial recovery (66.6%) towards the previous year's parity level (68.5%). The number of female senior officials decreased from 55% to 31.7%, while the number of technical workers reached parity at over 50%. There was a slight increase in estimated earned income, although the income gap is still significant, with women earning only 51.9 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Also from Indonesia, parity in the political empowerment subindex was recorded at 18.1 percent, with female members of parliament at 21.6 percent and female ministers at 20.7 percent. Meanwhile, parity in Educational Attainment was 97.2% overall and 97% in Health and Survival, virtually unchanged from the previous edition.
In the Educational Attainment subindex, East Asia and the Pacific had the second lowest score of 95.5 percent compared with other regions. Malaysia and New Zealand achieved full parity, along with nine other countries in the region, with scores above 99%. China, Lao PDR and Indonesia, with populations of more than 1.7 billion, have the lowest parity. Cambodia and Thailand are the only countries in the region to have improved parity by more than 1 percentage point compared with 2022. Thailand has improved parity in secondary enrollment, while Cambodia has improved literacy and enrollment in primary and tertiary education.
On the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, Lao PDR, the Philippines and Singapore recorded the highest parity for this sub-index, while Fiji, Timor-Leste and Japan recorded the lowest parity. On the other hand, Singapore achieved parity in the Health and Survival sub-index for sex ratio at birth.
In terms of parity in political empowerment, Indonesia, with its dense population, has regressed in this sub-index since 2017. However, Myanmar is one of the countries that experienced the most significant regression in Political Empowerment.
