The Global Gender Gap index 2015 compiled and analysed by the World Economic Forum, reveals that the gender gap has narrowed over the last ten years, but at a slowing pace. Women only now earning what men did a decade ago. The report, introduced in 2006, ranks 145 economies according to how well they are leveraging their female talent pool, based on health, education, economic opportunity, and political empowerment.

Forty countries (five more than last year), with Finland at the top of the ranking, achieved the full parity in health and survival subindex, measured by the sex ration at birth and the ratio of female healthy life expectancy over male. Mali, Albania, India, Armenia and China, the lowest-ranked countries, have not yet created the right policy framework to combat factors such as violence, disease and malnutrition, which most affect women’s health.

For educational attainment, another of the four pillars in the report, the picture is mixed. While men and women in Australia and in other 24 other states, are relatively equal in their educational participation and achievement, the index shows that in 22% of surveyed countries, gender disparities, in terms of access to school and participation in the learning process, has actually widened slightly since 2006.

Women have as good or better qualifications than men, but often their skills are not valued the same as men's, and their career progression is slower. In terms of providing economic opportunities to women, the report suggests that it has been left off of the government’s agenda in countries like Yemen, Syria, Pakistan e Iran. Fourteen countries, including four from Sub-Saharan Africa and five from Europe and Central Asia, are among the top ten that have women rising to positions of enterprise leadership, highlighting the success of those countries in maximizing the return from its investment in female education.

Political empowerment is measured by the ratio of females with seats in parliament over men, the ratio of females in ministerial roles over men and the number of years a female has been head of state during the past 50 years. According to the Report, only two countries have reached parity in parliament and only 4 have reached parity on ministerial roles. The region with the largest absolute improvement is Latin America, where the vast majority of publics express the belief that women make good political leadership. But in spite of these strides, violence against women and economic disparity between genders remain exceptionally high, leaving much room for progress in the Latin American quest for gender equality.

At the global level, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, in that order, are the closest to achieving gender equality. With the aid of progressive governments, these countries have managed to close over 80% of the gap between men and women on all four of the gender equality measures. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, women demanded power and changed the constitution to mandate that women hold at least 30 percent of senior political positions. The result? Today, Rwanda, which sits above the US and the UK in the index, is Africa’s best-performer in efforts to close the gender gap and seventh out of 145 countries on the global index. The country also has more women in its labour force than men. But life is far from perfect. The World Economic Forum report doesn’t account for other problems women face at disproportionate rates, such as high levels of domestic abuse and marital rape.
Elsewhere, the United States loses eight places since 2014, as the result of a widening wage gap and changes in ministerial level positions. The UK is 18th out of 145 countries, behind France, that has had the most improvement on Economic Participation and Opportunity and Political Empowerment, and Germany.

Twenty years after the Fourth World Conference on Women, progress has been multifaceted but lacking in balance. “The global gender gap across health, education, economic opportunity and politics has closed by only 4% in the past 10 years, but the gender pay gap has stalled meaning it could take another 118 years to close this gap completely”, the report said. Of the 109 countries that have been continuously covered in the report over the last ten years, handful of countries have been moving backwards in the index. These countries are spread across regions: in Asia, it is Sri Lanka; in Africa, Mali; in Europe, Croatia and Slovak Republic; and in the Middle East, Jordan and Iran.

Although no country has achieved complete equality between men and women, the progression of the Nordic states leaves Italy with much to show. It is making progress in promoting equality between man and woman, finishing 41st, but lags behind in the field of opportunities and economic participation of women, consolidating Italy’s place among countries like Cuba, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh. And while there seems to be a pervasive rhetoric that Italian men and women are equal, the Global Gender Gap Index 2015 suggests that in our country, women, on average, continue to earn less than men for similar work indicator. Despite Italy having experienced an increase of the women in the ministerial position's female-to-male ratio since 2006, it is not among the top ten best-performing countries on the Head of state/Prime Minister indicator.