The four subindexes Section B: Construction The Global Gender Gap Index examines the gap of the index between men and women across four fundamental categories (subindexes): Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health The Global Gender Gap Index is constructed and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Table using a four-step process, outlined below. Some B1 displays all four of these subindexes and the of the indicators listed in Table B2 require speci昀椀c 14 indicators that compose them, along with the standardization or modi昀椀cation to be used in the sources of data used for each. index. For further information on the indicator- speci昀椀c calculations, please refer to Section B of Economic Participation and Opportunity this appendix. This subindex contains three concepts: the participation gap, the remuneration gap and Step 1. Convert to ratios: the advancement gap. The participation gap is Initially, all data is converted to female-to-male captured using the difference between women ratios. For example, a country with 20% of women and men in labour-force participation rates. The in ministerial positions is assigned a ratio of 20 remuneration gap is captured through a hard data women to 80 men, thus a value of 0.25. This is to indicator (ratio of estimated female-to-male earned ensure that the index is capturing gaps between income)2 and a qualitative indicator gathered women and men’s attainment levels, rather than the through the World Economic Forum’s annual levels themselves. Executive Opinion Survey (wage equality for similar 3 work). Finally, the gap between the advancement Step 2. Data truncation at parity benchmark: of women and men is captured through two hard The ratios obtained above are truncated at the data statistics (the ratio of women to men among “equality benchmark”. For all indicators, except legislators, senior of昀椀cials and managers, and the two health indicators, this equality benchmark the ratio of women to men among technical and is considered to be 1, meaning equal numbers of professional workers). women and men. In the case of sex ratio at birth, 5 the equality benchmark is set at 0.944, and in Educational Attainment the case of healthy life expectancy the equality This subindex captures the gap between women’s benchmark is set at 1.06 to capture that fact that and men’s current access to education through women tend to naturally live longer than men. the enrolment ratios of women to men in primary-, As such, parity is considered as achieved if, on 6 secondary- and tertiary-level education. A longer- average, women live 昀椀ve years longer than men. term view of the country’s ability to educate women and men in equal numbers is captured Truncating the data at the equality benchmarks through the ratio of women’s literacy rate to men’s for each assigns the same score to a country that literacy rate. has reached parity between women and men and one where women have surpassed men. The Health and Survival type of rating scale chosen determines whether This subindex provides an overview of the the index is rewarding women’s empowerment differences between women’s and men’s health or gender equality.7 To capture gender equality, using two indicators. The 昀椀rst is the sex ratio two possible scales were considered. One was at birth, which aims speci昀椀cally to capture the a negative-positive scale capturing the size and phenomenon of “missing women”, prevalent in direction of the gender gap. This scale penalizes 4 countries with a strong son preference. Second, either men’s advantage over women or women’s we use the gap between women’s and men’s advantage over men and gives the highest points healthy life expectancy. This measure provides to absolute equality. The second choice was a an estimate of the number of years that women one-sided scale that measures how close women and men can expect to live in good health by are to reaching parity with men but does not reward accounting for the years lost to violence, disease, or penalize countries for having a gender gap in malnutrition and other factors. the other direction. We 昀椀nd the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes, as it does not Political Empowerment reward countries for having exceeded the parity This subindex measures the gap between men benchmark. However, disparities in either direction and women at the highest level of political are recorded in the Economy Pro昀椀les. decision-making through the ratio of women to men in ministerial positions and the ratio of women Step 3. Calculation of subindex scores: to men in parliamentary positions. In addition, Each of the four subindexes is computed as the the index includes the ratio of women to men in weighted average of the underlying individual terms of years in executive of昀椀ce (prime minister indicators. Averaging the different indicators would or president) for the last 50 years. Differences implicitly give more weight to the measure that between the participation of women and men exhibits the largest variability or standard deviation. at local levels of government are currently not We therefore 昀椀rst normalize the indicators by captured. Should such data become available at a equalizing their standard deviations. For example, globally comparative level in future years, it will be within the Educational Attainment subindex, considered for inclusion in the index. standard deviations for each of the four indicators Global Gender Gap Report 2023 64