July 18, 2023

No Country Has Achieved Full Gender Parity, Says UN Report

Staff Writer July 18, 2023

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Delegates at the opening ceremony of the Women Deliver 2023 Conference in Kigali, Rwanda

Delegates attend the opening ceremony of the Women Deliver conference in Kigali, Rwanda. Photo/UN Women

A global report by UN Women and UNDP shows that no country has achieved full gender parity.

According to the report, less than 1 percent of women and girls live in a country with high women’s empowerment and a small gender gap.

The report, launched at the Women Deliver Conference, found that women’s power and freedom to make choices and seize opportunities remain largely restricted.

The report saw UN Women and UNDP join forces to propose the Women’s Empowerment Index (WEI) and the Global Gender Parity Index (GGPI) as the twin indices for measuring gender parity and women’s empowerment.

The twin indices offer different but complementary lenses for assessing progress in advancing women’s human development, power, and freedoms. Together, they shed light on the complex challenges faced by women worldwide and pave the way for targeted interventions and policy reforms.

The comprehensive picture from the analysis of 114 countries shows that low women’s empowerment and large gender gaps are commonplace.

UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous called for sustained efforts to deliver on the promise of gender equality, securing the human rights of women and girls and ensure that their fundamental freedoms are fully realized.

“With the Sustainable Development Goals, the global community has made a strong commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment. However, we can see clearly with these new indices that across countries, women’s full potential remains unrealized, and large gender gaps continue to be commonplace, thereby obstructing and slowing progress in the realization of all the Goals”, she concluded.

The Report also highlights that less than 1 percent of women and girls live in countries with both high levels of women’s empowerment and high gender parity, while more than 90 percent of the world’s female population —3.1 billion women and girls — live in countries characterized by a large women’s empowerment deficit and a large gender gap.

“This eye-opening analysis shows that higher human development is not by itself a sufficient condition, as more than half the countries with low and middle performance in the women’s empowerment index and global parity index fall in the very high and high human development groups,” said UNDP Administrator, Achim Steiner. “Too many women and girls are living in countries that only allow them to reach a fraction of their potential and these fresh new insights are ultimately designed to help to effect real change – for real people”.

The WEI and the GGPI are useful tools for policymakers, providing vital evidence on progress and the urgent policy actions needed to achieve women’s empowerment and gender equality.

Further, the indices reveal the need for comprehensive policy action in health policies, equality in education, work-life balance and support for families. They also pushed for women’s equal participation in all spheres of life and condemned violence against women through implementing measures focused on prevention, changing social norms, and eliminating discriminatory laws and policies.

Adapted from Citizen TV

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