PHL slips 8 places in WEF Global Gender Gap Index

The Philippines has dropped eight spots to 16th place in the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report released Tuesday, with its final score slipping by 1.8 percentage points to 78.1%.

Still, the Philippines enjoys the smallest gender gap in Asia, with Laos coming in a distant second in 43rd place.

257 years to equality

According to the WEF Global Gender Gap Index 2020, the worldwide gender gap in the workplace had widened further since last year, with gender inequality growing in workplaces worldwide despite increasing demands for equal treatment.

While women appear to be gradually closing the gender gap in areas such as politics, health and education, workplace inequality is not expected to be erased until the year 2276.

Last year, parity appeared to be "only" 202 years off.

The Geneva-based organization's annual report tracks disparities between the sexes in 153 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.

The overall gender gap across these categories has shrunk, Tuesday's report showed, with WEF now forecasting it will take 99.5 years for women to achieve parity on average, down from the 108 years forecast in last year's report.

But while some sectors have shown improvements, others lag far behind.

General parity "will take more than a lifetime to achieve," WEF acknowledged in a statement.

PHL data

The Philippines ranked 16th in the rankings, down eight places from its spot in the 2018. Still, it is the highest country in Asia on the list.

In the East Asia and the Pacific region, its score of 78.1% puts it just below New Zealand (79.9%, globally ranked number 6).

By subindex, this is where the Philippines ranked out of 153 countries in the 2020 index:

Economic Participation and Opportunity: 14. Within this subindex, the Philippines has achieved parity when it comes to:

• legislators, senior officials and managers
• professional and technical workers

Educational Attainment: 37. Within this subindex, the Philippines has achieved parity when it comes to:

• literacy rate
• enrollment in secondary education
• enrollment in tertiary education

Health and Survival: 44. Within this subindex, the Philippines exceeds parity when it comes to.

• healthy life expectancy in years

Political Empowerment: 29. The Philippines has not achieved parity in any of the categories in this subindex, and the gap has in fact widened. "This downgrade is almost entirely attributable to lower female representation in the cabinet, which declined from 25% to 10% between 2017 and 2019. Female representation in the parliament [Congress] was also slightly down and stood at 28% at the beginning of 2019," the report said.

The subsection on the Philippines states the following:

The Philippines has closed 78% of its overall gender gap. Once a member of the top 10 on the Global Gender Gap Index, the country now ranks 16th as a result of a small decline in its score (78.1, down 1.8 percentage points).

The Philippines boasts the smallest gender gap of the Asian continent by far—the second best is Lao PDR, which ranks 43rd. The country’s performance is strong across three of the four dimensions of the index.

It has closed 80% of the Economic Participation and Opportunity gender gap, with women outnumbering men in senior and leadership roles, as well as in professional and technical professions. It is only one of four countries to achieve this feat. The country ranks 5th on the indicator assessing gender wage equality, with a score of 81.2. 

The Philippines has closed both its Educational Attainment and Health and Survival gender gaps. Women can expect to live in good health five years longer than men. Literacy is universal, with rates above 98% for both sexes. A significantly larger share of women is enrolled in secondary education (71% compared with 60% of men) and tertiary education (57% versus 43%).

However, the Political Empowerment gap has widened considerably over the past two years, albeit from a relatively high base (score of 35.3%, down 0.063), causing the country to drop from 13th to 29th position.

This downgrade is almost entirely attributable to lower female representation in the cabinet, which declined from 25% to 10% between 2017 and 2019. Female representation in the parliament [Congress] was also slightly down and stood at 28% at the beginning of 2019.

 40-percent wage gap

WEF said the gender gap was more than 96 percent closed in the area of education and could be eliminated altogether within just 12 years.

The gap was equally small in the health and survival category, but the WEF report said it remained unclear how long it would take to achieve full parity in this domain due to lingering issues in populous countries like China and India.

Politics meanwhile is the domain where the least progress has been made to date, but it showed the biggest improvement in the past year.

Women in 2019 held 25.2 percent of parliamentary lower-house seats and 22.1 percent of ministerial positions, compared to 24.1 percent and 19 percent in 2018.

But when it comes to the workplace, the picture is less rosy.

The report, which looked at a variety of factors including opportunity and pay, said it would take 257 years before there was equality in the workplace.

It highlighted positive developments, like a general increase in the share of women among skilled workers and senior officials.

But it stressed that this trend was counterbalanced by "stagnating or reversing gaps in labur market participation and monetary rewards."

On average, only 55 percent of adult women are in the labour market today, compared to 78 percent for men, while women globally on average still make 40 percent less than men for similar work in similar positions.

The wage gap has been steadily shrinking in OECD countries over the past decade, but it has at the same time expanded in emerging and developing economies, the WEF report showed.

Global disparities

Progress across the categories varies greatly in different countries and regions.

The report pointed out that while Western European countries could close their overall gender gap in 54.4 years, countries in the Middle East and North Africa will take nearly 140 years to do so.

Overall, the Nordic countries once again dominated the top of the table: men and women were most equal in Iceland, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden.

Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and finally Yemen showed the biggest overall gender gaps of the countries surveyed.

Among the world's 20 leading economies, Germany fared the best, taking 10th place, followed by France at 15th, South Africa at 17th, Canada at 19th and Britain at 21st.

The United States continued its decline, slipping two places to 53rd, with the report pointing out that "American women still struggle to enter the very top business positions," and are also "under-represented in political leadership roles." — AFP