Pakistan ranks lowest in the world in WEF Global Gender Gap Report 2025

KARACHI, JUN 13 (DNA): Pakistan has been ranked at the bottom of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, placing 148th out of 148 countries.

The report, released on Wednesday, assigned Pakistan a gender parity score of 56.7% — a 0.3 percentage point decline from its 2024 score.

This marks the second consecutive drop in Pakistan’s score, which peaked at 57.7% in 2023. The Global Gender Gap Index assesses gender equality across four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.

Despite ranking last, Pakistan’s position has only declined by three places from last year’s 145th. At the top of the index, Iceland retained its leading position. In the South Asian region, Bangladesh ranked highest at 24th globally, while India stood at 131st overall and fifth regionally.

Since launching in 2006, it has been the longest-standing index tracking the progress of numerous countries’ efforts to close gaps across these dimensions and move towards gender parity over time.

Despite the recent drops and its bottom ranking on this year’s report, Pakistan has closed +2.3 of its gender gap since 2006. The sole subindex advance registered by Pakistan in this year’s edition is ‘Educational Attainment’, bumping educational parity upwards by +1.5 percentage points to reach 85.1%.

The report argues that part of the shift is driven by an increase in female literacy rates (from 46.5% to 48.5%). However, parity has also risen because male enrolment shares have dropped in tertiary education, increasing the relative balance between men and women but lowering educational reach overall.

Pakistan ranks 137th out of 148 countries on the ‘Educational Attainment’ subindex, and its highest subindex rank, 118th, is in ‘Political Empowerment’.

However, Pakistan’s score on ‘Political Empowerment’ has dropped from 12.2% in 2024 to 11% for this year. Despite a rise in parity in parliament, the country was listed among those with all-male ministerial cabinets.

The country’s highest score is on the ‘Health and Survival’ subindex at 95.9%, and it attained a score of 34.7% on ‘Economic Participation and Opportunity’. The report says that income disparity in Pakistan has increased slightly since the last edition (+.02 points), as has perceived wage inequality (+4 percentage points).

Overall, the report finds that there is still a combined global average gender gap of over 30% across the four areas that it covers. The global gender gap score in 2025 for all 148 economies included in this edition of the index stands at 68.8%, rising slightly from 68.4% in 2024.

In her comments on this year’s report, WEF Managing Director Saadia Zahidi says that it “arrives at a decisive moment, with the world in flux. Technological breakthroughs, geopolitical conflict, and economic uncertainty are creating unprecedented challenges as well as bringing new opportunities. Amid such change, gender parity is both a principle and a strategy.”

According to the managing director, “Economies that tap into the full spectrum of their talent and human capital are best positioned to navigate an era of transformation and accelerate productivity and prosperity. Yet most economies are not fully leveraging this pathway for growth”.