Through the Global Gender Gap Report 2014, the World Economic Forum quantifies the magnitude of gender-based disparities and tracks their progress over time. While no single measure can capture the complete situation, the Global Gender Gap Index presented in this Report seeks to measure one important aspect of gender equality: the relative gaps between women and men across four key areas: health, education, economy and politics.
The Global Gender Gap Index was first published in 2006 with a view to creating a comprehensive gender parity index that is able to track gaps over time relative to an equality benchmark, thus providing information on a country’s progress relative to itself as well as to other countries. One hundred eleven countries have been included during that time. This year’s Report seeks to provide this information by country in the country analysis section above, particularly in the case of countries with notable progress or decline. Additionally, nearly a decade of data allows us to extract aggregate information about global progress. The main findings of this analysis are presented in this section.
On the Global Gender Gap Index, the region with the largest absolute change is Latin America (with 4.18% of the gender gap closed), followed by North America (with 4.06% of the gender gap closed), Middle East and North Africa (with 3.08% of the gender gap closed), Sub-Saharan Africa (with 3.06% of the gender gap closed) and Europe and Central Asia (with 3.06% of the gender gap closed). Asia and the Pacific is the only region that shows a negative absolute change (with 3.15% of the gender gap widened). When compared to their own starting points nearly a decade ago, the order of relative change is exactly the same.