BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 34 of 144

Correct — C, the World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report is a World Economic Forum publication and has been since the index was created in 2006. The edition in front of the candidates when this paper was set carries the WEF imprint on its cover — 'Insight Report, June 2023' — and its terms-of-use page states that the analysis is based on a methodology integrating statistics from international organisations with the Forum's own executive opinion survey. The index it carries benchmarks 146 economies on four subindexes: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Each indicator is expressed as the ratio of the female value to the male value, so a score of 1 means full parity and 0 means complete imparity, and the report measures gaps between women and men rather than levels of development — a poor country can outrank a rich one if its gap is narrower. The 2023 edition found the global gender gap 68.4 per cent closed, up 0.3 percentage points on the previous year, and calculated that at the pace of change since 2006 it would take 131 years to reach full parity. Iceland took first place for the fourteenth year running at 91.2 per cent, the only economy in the world to have closed more than 90 per cent of its gap. India stood 127th of 146 with a score of 0.643, having improved by 1.4 percentage points and eight places from 135th the year before. That single figure, 127 out of 146, was in every Indian newspaper in the last week of June 2023, three months before this examination, and it is the reason the question is on the paper. One consequence of measuring gaps rather than levels is worth carrying into the exam hall, because it is the fact that makes this index different from every other ranking a candidate meets: Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Americas, finished seventh in the world in 2023 on a score of 0.811, well ahead of most high-income economies. The index is not a league table of prosperity or of how comfortable women's lives are — it is a measure of how far apart a country's women and men stand on the same four dimensions.

• (a)the World Bank — The World Bank's own annual flagship is the World Development Report, and it does run a gender publication — Women, Business and the Law, which scores economies on the laws and regulations that restrict women's economic participation. That is exactly why this option is dangerous: the Bank has a gender index, just not this one. The distinction to hold is that Women, Business and the Law measures what the statute book says, while the Global Gender Gap Index measures outcomes actually observed in wages, schooling, health and political office.
• (b)the UN Women — UN Women is the United Nations entity for gender equality and the empowerment of women, created in 2010, and it is the most intuitive wrong answer on the paper — if an agency exists solely for gender, surely it publishes the gender report. It does publish on the subject: Progress of the World's Women, and the annual SDG gender snapshot brought out with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. But it does not produce the Global Gender Gap Index, and confusing an organisation's subject with its specific outputs is the single most common way to lose a mark on report-and-publisher questions.
• (d)the UNDP — The United Nations Development Programme publishes the Human Development Report, and inside it two gender measures that candidates routinely mistake for this one: the Gender Inequality Index, which combines reproductive health, empowerment and labour-market participation into a loss-of-achievement figure, and the Gender Development Index, which compares female and male HDI values. Both are UNDP; neither is the Global Gender Gap Index. If you can attach the words 'Human Development Report' to UNDP and 'Davos' to the World Economic Forum, this option separates cleanly from the correct one.

The World Economic Forum is not an inter-governmental body at all. It is a private, not-for-profit foundation founded in 1971 by the German economist Klaus Schwab as the European Management Forum, renamed the World Economic Forum in 1987, based at Cologny near Geneva in Switzerland, and best known for the annual meeting it convenes each January at the ski resort of Davos in the canton of Graubünden. Its influence rests on convening power and on a stable of benchmarking reports that governments cite and journalists rank countries by: the Global Competitiveness Report, the Global Risks Report, the Future of Jobs Report, the Energy Transition Index, the Travel and Tourism Development Index and the Global Gender Gap Report. Those reports are precisely why the Forum turns up in examinations far more often than its formal standing would suggest. The Global Gender Gap Index, first published in 2006, is its longest-running such benchmark and deliberately measures relative gaps rather than absolute levels, so that a country cannot climb the table simply by getting richer — it climbs only by narrowing the distance between its women and its men.

Report-and-publisher questions are pure association and they are decided before the exam hall, so the useful work is building a table rather than reasoning in the moment. Four institutions crowd this space and each owns a distinct flagship: the World Economic Forum owns the Global Gender Gap Report; UNDP owns the Human Development Report and, within it, the Gender Inequality Index and the Gender Development Index; the World Bank owns the World Development Report and Women, Business and the Law; UN Women owns Progress of the World's Women. Three of the four options here therefore have a genuine gender publication of their own, which is what makes the item harder than it looks — the setter has not offered a single irrelevant name. The discriminating association is the word 'Gap'. Gap means a ratio of women to men, ratio-based benchmarking of economies is the Forum's house style across all its indices, and 'Gender Gap' belongs to Davos in the same way that 'Human Development' belongs to UNDP. Fix that one pairing and the other three fall into place, because each of them is then attached to a different, better-known flagship.

• The Global Gender Gap Report has been published by the World Economic Forum since 2006; the 2023 edition, issued as an Insight Report in June 2023, covered 146 economies and was in the news three months before this paper was set.
• The index has four subindexes — Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment — and scores each indicator as the female-to-male ratio on a 0-to-1 scale, so it measures gaps, not levels of income or development.
• In 2023 the world had closed 68.4 per cent of its overall gender gap, an improvement of 0.3 percentage points, and the Forum calculated that full parity was 131 years away at the prevailing rate; Iceland led for the fourteenth successive year at 91.2 per cent, the only economy above 90 per cent.
• India ranked 127th of 146 with a score of 0.643 in 2023, up eight places from 135th in 2022; by subindex it stood 142nd on Economic Participation and Opportunity (0.367), 26th on Educational Attainment (1.000, full parity in enrolment at every level), 142nd on Health and Survival (0.950) and 59th on Political Empowerment (0.253), with women 15.1 per cent of parliamentarians — the highest for India since the inaugural 2006 edition.
• Within Southern Asia India was sixth of nine in 2023, behind Bangladesh (59th), Bhutan (103rd), Sri Lanka (115th), Nepal (116th) and Maldives (124th), and ahead of Pakistan (142nd), Iran (143rd) and Afghanistan (146th).
• Sort the neighbouring flagships by owner: Human Development Report, Gender Inequality Index and Gender Development Index — UNDP; World Development Report and Women, Business and the Law — World Bank; Progress of the World's Women — UN Women; Global Competitiveness Report, Global Risks Report and Global Gender Gap Report — World Economic Forum.

• Assigning the Global Gender Gap Report to UN Women because gender is that agency's whole mandate — the report is a World Economic Forum product
• Confusing the Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum) with the Gender Inequality Index and Gender Development Index, which sit inside UNDP's Human Development Report
• Reading India's rank as a statement about how well its women live in absolute terms; the index scores the distance between women and men, so a poorer country with a narrower gap outranks a richer one with a wider gap

BPSC asks this family in its barest form — name the publishing body, or quote the headline figure and the rank — so a candidate who has memorised a clean report-to-institution table clears it in seconds. UPSC asks the same association but usually with a twist: which of these is not a sub-index of a named index, which indicators go into the Global Hunger Index, or which body declares a ranking that is 'sometimes seen in the news'. Learn each flagship report with three things attached — the issuing body, what it actually measures, and India's latest rank — and both exams are covered.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is NOT one of the four subindexes of the Global Gender Gap Index?

  • (a)Economic Participation and Opportunity
  • (b)Educational Attainment
  • (c)Access to Justice and Legal Rights
  • (d)Political Empowerment

  Answer(c) Access to Justice and Legal Rights — the four subindexes are Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Legal restrictions on women are scored separately by the World Bank in Women, Business and the Law.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Gender Inequality Index (GII) forms part of which annual publication?

  • (a)The Human Development Report of the UNDP
  • (b)The Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum
  • (c)The World Development Report of the World Bank
  • (d)Progress of the World's Women, published by UN Women

  Answer(a) The Human Development Report of the UNDP — the GII, along with the Gender Development Index, is a UNDP measure. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index is a separate benchmark with four subindexes of its own.