The World Economic Forum released its “Global Gender Gap Report 2022” 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 146 countries in an attempt to identify areas in need for gender gap reduction. The report unveiled that the global gender gap index stood at 68.1% in 2022, implying that an average international gap of 31.9% still needs to be sealed to complete universal gender equality. In details, the report revealed that countries included in the index have covered 95.8% of the gap related to the health & survival between men and women and 94.4% 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 22.0% and 60.3% of the respective gaps were closed. The report further highlighted that out of the 145 countries that were covered in last year’s report and are still prevalent in that of this year, only 87 nations have reported an improvement in their overall gender gap score. The report also revealed that only ten countries have succeeded in closing more than 80% of their overall gender gap in 2022 (namely Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Namibia, Ireland and Germany). 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 emerged as the second-worst performing region in the global gender gap index right ahead of South Asia, yet was able to tame gender disparities by more than 63%, versus 76.9% for North America, which topped the list, and 76.6% for Western Europe, which ranked second. More specifically, 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, East Asia & the Pacific and South Asia, while ranking ahead of East Asia & the Pacific and South Asia on the health & survival front. From another standpoint, 7 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 68^th worldwide and 1^st regionally in the 2022 global gender gap index (score: 0.716), followed by Lebanon (global rank: 119^th; score: 0.644), Tunisia (global rank: 120^th; score: 0.643) and Jordan (global rank: 122^nd; score: 0.639).

Locally, Lebanon’s 2022 score compares to a score of 0.638 in 2021. In details, the report positioned Lebanon 135^th globally (score: 0.492) in the economic participation & opportunity sub-index, 90^th (score: 0.983) in the educational attainment sub-index, 75^th (score: 0.971) in the health & survival pillar, and 110^th (score: 0.129) in the political empowerment metric.