The Philippines Falls Two Spots in Annual Gender Gap Index, Still Second Best in East Asia
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report last month. And against a total of 146 countries, the Philippines ranked 19th with a slightly lower score than last year.
The Global Gender Gap Report seeks to measure and understand each country's progress when it comes to gender parity. It is based on economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The WEF uses a 0 to 1 scale, where 1 represents the most desirable gender parity score.
“While the country has improved upon its first gender parity score by 4.2 percentage points, since 2013 progress has hovered between 0.783 and 0.799. In 2022 the Philippines records a gender gap of 21.7 percent, similar to last year,” the report said.
In a country with about 54 million women, the Philippines had a respectable score of 0.794 in the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, as well. Share of women in the workforce was 24.5 percentage points lower compared to the share of men. But the WEF added that, at the very least, "gender parity for legislative, senior officers and managers, as well as for professional and technical workers, remains constant."
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In terms of the educational attainment sub-index, the country was placed at the 46th spot.
The lingering effects of the pandemic on the education system was cited as one of the key factors for the Philippines' slight dip. “However, on educational attainment, gender parity decreased at the level of enrolment in primary education, with a notably larger share of boys than girls in growing enrolment numbers overall,” the WEF noted.
The data also showed that Filipino women graduates led professional fields like agriculture, forestry, fisheries and veterinary, arts and humanities, education, health and welfare, mathematics and statistics, and social sciences, among others.
For the 13th straight year, the Gender Gap Index had Iceland in the first spot, with Finland and Norway coming in at second and third, respectively. Our country, nevertheless, had the second-highest ranking in East Asia and the Pacific, next to only New Zealand in that regard. This also puts the Philippines ahead of countries like the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, and more.
The WEF pointed out that, unfortunately, progress has stalled in most countries.
