Iran Ranks 140th in WEF’s 2017 Gender Gap Index

Iran has ranked 140th in the latest World Economic Forum annual report on “The Global Gender Gap”—a one-notch drop from last year’s 139th.

The WEF report gave Iran a score of 0.583 in terms of women’s parity with men (0.00 suggesting absolute imparity and 1.00 indicating complete parity).

The 2017 report covers 144 countries and quantifies the magnitude of gender disparities and tracks their progress over time, with a specific focus on the relative gaps between women and men across four key areas: health, education, economy and politics.

Iran ranked 140th for economic participation and opportunity, 100th for educational attainment, 135th for health and survival, and 136th for political empowerment.

The economic participation and opportunity sub-index contains three concepts: participation gap, remuneration gap and advancement gap.

The participation gap is captured using the difference between women and men in labor force. Iran scored 0.225 (the average is 0.667) and ranked 143rd in this category.

The remuneration gap is captured through a hard data indicator (ratio of estimated female-to-male earned income) where Iran ranked 141st and a qualitative indicator gathered through the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey (wage equality for similar work) where the country was placed at 99th.

Finally, the gap between the advancement of women and men is captured through two hard data statistics. In terms of the ratio of women to men among legislators, senior officials and managers, Iran ranked 103rd, and in the ratio of women to men among technical and professional workers subcategory, the country ranked 112th.

The Educational Attainment sub-index captures the gap between women’s and men’s current access to education through ratios of women to men in primary-, secondary- and tertiary-level education.

A longer-term view of the country’s ability to educate women and men in equal numbers is captured through the ratio of the female literacy rate to the male literacy rate. The sub-index contains four variables.

Iran’s literacy ranking was 103rd, enrolment in primary education 1st, enrolment in secondary education 99th and enrolment in tertiary education 104th.

Health and Survival sub-index provides an overview of the differences between women’s and men’s health through the use of two indicators.

The first is the sex ratio at birth, which aims specifically to capture the phenomenon of “missing women”, prevalent in many countries with a strong son preference. Iran’s sex ratio at birth ranking was 1st.

The second indicator takes into account the gap between women’s and men’s healthy life expectancy, which provides an estimate of the number of years that women and men can expect to live in good health considering the years lost to violence, disease, malnutrition and other relevant factors. Iran ranked 141st in this variable.

Political Empowerment measures the gap between men and women at the highest level of political decision-making through the ratio of women to men in ministerial positions where Iran ranked 113th and the ratio of women to men in parliamentary positions in which the country stood at 136th.

WEF says Iran has reversed some of its recent progress on the ‘Educational Attainment’ and ‘Health and Survival’ gender gaps, but maintained stable, modest progress on the Economic Participation and Opportunity, and Political Empowerment sub-indexes—albeit from a low base.

Iceland topped the rankings for the ninth straight year and Yemen came in last on WEF’s Global Gender Gap index.