Oct. 29 – India has been ranked in the bottom half among 134 countries in terms of gender equality in the World Economic Forum’s latest ranking that assessed the distribution of resources and opportunities among males and females.
Slipping one place from last year, India occupies 114th position in the Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report” for 2009. Iceland occupied the top spot.
Apart from Iceland, the list features three more Nordic nations at the top: Finland (2), Norway (3) and Sweden (4), while New Zealand was in the fifth spot. Though placed way ahead of India, neighboring China has dropped to the 60th position. The country was 57th last year.
“India (114), Korea (115), Iran (128) and Pakistan (132) continue to hold some of the lowest positions in the Asian rankings, while India, Iran and Pakistan perform very poorly on the economic, education and health sub-indexes, their overall scores are partially bolstered by relatively good performances on political empowerment,” the WEF said. India was ranked 114th in 2007 and 98th in 2006.
Other countries in the top ten were South Africa (6), Denmark (7), Ireland (8), Philippines (9) and Lesotho (10). Great Britain ranked 15th while the United States was 31st. Among the other BRIC nations, Brazil was 82nd while Russia ranked 51st.
This article wonderfully forgot mention China, the largest economic body among BRIC. China ranks 60th, which is much better than India.
Communist china ranks much higher than the largest democratic country. How ironic is it?
The article did mention China, read a little closer. “Though placed way ahead of India, neighboring China has dropped to the 60th position. The country was 57th last year. “
One could of course argue that India’s getting the vote tot he people is partially impeded by a lack of infrastructure, but even then about 50% of the total population voted in the recent elections. Thats a big improvement on China, where noone gets the right to vote. The gender equality thing has a way to go though in India, although progress is being made. The current President of India is a woman.