The Global Gender Gap Report is released by

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q34 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q34 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer