The World Economic Forum released its “Global Gender Gap Report 2021” 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 156 countries in an attempt to identify areas in need for gender gap reduction. The report unveiled that the global gender gap index stood at 67.7% in 2021, implying that an average international gap of 32.3% still needs to be sealed to complete universal gender equality. In details, the report revealed that countries included in the index have covered 97.5% of the gap in health between men and women and 95.0% 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 21.8% and 58.3% of the respective gaps were closed. The report further highlighted that out of the 153 countries that were covered in last year’s report and are still prevalent in that of this year, 98 nations have reported an improvement in their overall gender gap score. The report also revealed that only eight countries have succeeded in closing more than 80% of their overall gender gap in 2021 (namely Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Namibia, Rwanda and Lithuania). Last-placed Afghanistan, on the other hand, has closed merely 44% 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 77.6% for Western Europe, which topped the list, and 76.4% for North America, which ranked second. More specifically, and always according to the report, the MENA region continued to house the 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, 12 MENA countries registered some progress in their global gender gap index scores this year, while 6 countries witnessed a drop in their scores. The report positioned the United Arab Emirates 72^nd worldwide and 1^st regionally in the 2021 global gender gap index (score: 0.716), followed by Tunisia (global rank: 126; score: 0.649), Egypt (global rank: 129; score: 0.639) and Jordan (global rank: 131; score: 0.638).

Locally, Lebanon ranked 132^nd in 2021 with a score of 0.638, implying it managed to close some 63.8% of the gender gap disparities. The 2021 score compares to a score of 0.600 in 2020. In details, the report positioned Lebanon 139^th globally (score: 0.487) in the economic participation & opportunity sub-index, 113^th (score: 0.964) in the educational attainment sub-index, 82^nd (score: 0.970) in the health & survival pillar, and 112^th (score: 0.129) in the political empowerment metric. It is worth noting that Lebanon outperformed Turkey (global rank: 133), Algeria (global rank: 136) and Bahrain (global rank: 137) only to name a few.