Women's Empowerment: Measuring the Global Gender Gap

This study is an attempt by the World Economic Forum to assess the current size of the gender gap by measuring the extent to which women in 58 countries have achieved equality. There were five main criteria used in the study, drawn from the findings of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM):

• Economic participation: the number of women in the workforce and the remuneration they receive (for equal work) as compared to men.
• Economic opportunity: captures the opportunities available to women once they are part of the workforce - this category includes survey data on maternity leave benefits, government-provided childcare, etc, from the World Economic Forum’s own annual Executive Opinion Survey.
• Political empowerment: the participation of women in decision-making structures, as compared to men.
• Educational attainment: women’s enrolment rates in primary, secondary and tertiary education.
• Health and well-being: this category attempts mainly to assess the quality of reproductive healthcare available to women, given the quality of the overall healthcare services in a particular country.

The aim of the report is to facilitate the work of governments, aid agencies and non-governmental organisations by providing a benchmarking tool to assess the size of the gender gap, ranking countries according to the level of advancement of their female population. The Gender Gap Report quantifies the size of the gender gap in 58 countries, including all 30 OECD countries and 28 other emerging markets. The study combines publicly available “hard” data from international organisations and national statistics offices with qualitative data from the World Economic Forum's own annual Executive Opinion Survey to create the overall rankings. The annual Survey, conducted by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Programme, polled close to 9,000 business leaders in 104 economies worldwide in 2004. The survey questionnaire was designed to capture a broad range of factors central to creating a healthy business environment, including labour practices, the quality of the country’s educational system, its infrastructure and general level of institutional development.