G is for ... Gentle... n ... Grasshopper-ish ...

 

It’s not exactly a grasshopper-ish, gigantic leap from faucets and plumbing to gender inequality. More like a gentle, natural progression. Not glaringly obvious to you? Let me explain.

 

In my previous post, I mentioned that around 800 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. A gobsmacking 2.5 billion, nearly a third of the global population, do not have sanitation facilities. And therein lies the crux of the gender gap. It starts with girls in the developing world, particularly those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, dropping out of school once they reach puberty. One of the contributing reasons is - the lack of female toilets in schools. Curtailing of education means curtailing of growth, of opportunities.

The Global Gender Gap Report was first published by the World Economic Forum in 2006. It devised an equality index based on several different parameters such as education, employment, political empowerment, health and survival, and the latest version covers 153 countries. The index tries to assess how evenly each country distributes its resources among its male and female populations, regardless of how resource rich or poor it is per se. Therefore, it is not a given that the more affluent nations would have a better showing. A score of 1.0 would mean perfect gender equality and 0 would signify perfect inequality. In the real world, there are limiting factors like life expectancy at birth and survival rates which translate to the max possible score of 0.9949. 

What is gravely shocking for me is that even the most gender equal countries like Iceland, Norway and Sweden don't come close to this max limiting value. The highest value for the index is 0.892 (Iceland). The less said about India the better -  dismally behind our neighbours like Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Long way to go before we close the gender gap. The worst showing is by countries like Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria - unsurprisingly, women are treated most unfairly in conflict zones. 

The pandemic has thrown its own spanner into the works. The current version of the report, which just came out in March 2021, has found the move towards gender parity has stagnated because of the pandemic. The hiring of women dropped during 2020 as compared to men, and rehiring after job losses has also been weak. Due to school closures, women have had to take on additional childcare/teaching responsibilities during 2020 and therefore have faced much greater challenges in the WFH environment than men. All in all, the covid era has been a setback for gender equality nearly everywhere in the world. Read more here.

A-Z Challenge 2021