Bangladesh most gender-neutral country in SA: Report

Bangladesh secured the top rank among the South Asian countries and the 50th position globally for closing the gender gap in the latest report published by World Economic Forum (WEF).

Bangladesh has closed 72.6% of its overall gender gap and is the only one of the seven South Asian countries studied to feature in the top 100 of the Global Gender Gap Index, according to WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020.

“It is the only country in the world where women have had a longer tenure than men at the helm of the state over the past 50 years, the report mentioned adding that “This contributes to the strong performance on the Political Empowerment sub index (score of 54.5%, 7th),” it said.

According to the report, in Bangladesh there are only 8% of women in the cabinet and only 20% in parliament.

In the economic sphere, as of 2018, 38% of adult women were part of the labour force (up from 34% in 2017), compared with 84% of men.

“Only one in 10 leadership roles is occupied by a woman (139th), and the estimated average annual income of women is 40% that of the men,” the WEF report said.

Bangladesh was in the 91st position in WEF's 2006 report.

Iceland remained the world's most gender-neutral country on the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report followed by Norway and Finland. Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen occupy the last three positions as the least gender-neutral countries in the world.

"The time it will take to close the gender gap narrowed to 99.5 years in 2019. While an improvement on 2018 -– when the gap was calculated to take 108 years to close -- it still means parity between men and women across health, education, work and politics will take more than a lifetime to achieve," the WEF said.