The World Economic Forum released its “Global Gender Gap Report 2019” in which it sheds light on the positive correlation between gender gap reduction and a country’s national level of competitiveness. More particularly, the report assesses gender disparities on the economic, political, educational attainment, and health fronts in 153 countries in an attempt to identify areas in need for gender gap reduction. The report unveiled that the global gender gap index stood at 68.6% in 2019, implying that an average international gap of 31.4% still needs to be sealed to complete universal gender equality. In details, the report revealed that countries included in the index have covered 95.7% of the gap in health between men and women and 96.1% of the gap related to educational attainment. The improvement, however, was far less pronounced in terms of political empowerment and economic participation and opportunity, where only 24.7% and 57.8% of the respective gaps were closed. The report further highlighted that out of the 149 countries that were covered in last year’s report and are still prevalent in that of this year, 101 nations have reported an improvement in their overall gender gap score. The report also revealed that only five countries have succeeded in closing more than 80% of their overall gender gap in 2019 (namely Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Nicaragua), compared to seven countries in each of 2017 & 2018 and five countries in 2016. Last-placed Yemen, on the other hand, has closed merely 50% of the gap between men and women.

On a regional scale, the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region remained the worst performing region in the global gender gap index for yet another consecutive year right behind South Asia, yet was able to tame gender disparities by more than 60%, versus 76.7% for Western Europe, which topped the list, and 72.9% for North America, which ranked second. More specifically, and always according to the report, the MENA region continued to house three out of the five worst ranking countries in the world in the political empowerment sub-index. The region also ranked second-to-last in the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, only ahead of South Asia. As far as educational attainment is concerned, the MENA region only outperformed Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, while ranking ahead of East Asia & the Pacific and South Asia on the health & survival front. From another standpoint, 10 MENA countries registered some progress in their global gender gap index scores this year, while 8 countries witnessed a drop in their scores. The report positioned the United Arab Emirates 120^th worldwide and 1^st regionally in the 2019 global gender gap index (score: 0.655), followed by Kuwait (global rank: 122; score: 0.650), Tunisia (global rank: 124; score: 0.644), Turkey (global rank: 130; score: 0.635), and Algeria (global rank: 132; score: 0.634).

Locally, Lebanon lost five positions in the global gender gap index to rank 145^th in 2019, scoring 0.599, implying it managed to close some 59.9% of the gender gap disparities. The 2019 score compares to a score of 0.595 in 2018 at a time when the country held the 140^th place. In details, the report positioned Lebanon 139^th globally (score: 0.442) in the economic participation & opportunity sub-index, 111^th (score: 0.964) in the educational attainment sub-index, 124^th (score: 0.967) in the health & survival pillar, and 149^th (score: 0.024) in the political empowerment metric. It is worth noting that Lebanon outperformed Saudi Arabia (global rank: 146), Iran (global rank: 148), Syria (global rank: 150), Iraq (global rank: 152), and Yemen (global rank: 153).