Europe tops the gender-gap league table, but the map still looks awkward

Europe has managed to reclaim a familiar trophy: first place in the World Economic Forum’s annual gender-gap index. The continent has closed 75.7% of its overall gap between men and women, leaving 24.3% still open. That is a respectable number, if one is generous with adjectives and patient with arithmetic.

The WEF has measured this divide since 2006, tracking education, health, economic participation and politics. Europe has improved by 7 percentage points over that period, yet the report still puts full parity about 70 years away. In other words, progress is real, but the timetable is long enough to make even the most committed policymaker look like a planner for the next century.

The continent’s strongest showing is in politics. Europe leads that category with a score of 37%, ahead of Latin America and the Caribbean at 34.2%. It also comes close to parity in educational attainment, at 99.5%, and in health and survival, at 96.9%. Economic participation and opportunity is another matter: there Europe ranks fifth, with 69.5%, nearly eight percentage points behind North America’s 77.1%.

The regional picture is flattering only from a certain angle. Europe accounts for the largest share of countries in the global top ten, and the WEF says that since the index was launched in 2006, European economies have occupied 69% of all top-ten places. This year, seven European economies made the cut: Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany and Ireland. Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden have all appeared in every top ten for the past two decades.

Iceland remains the standout. It has closed 93% of its gender gap and has held the global top spot since the 2009 edition. Its political empowerment score is 95.4%, helped by deliberate public policy on gender balance and by a long record of women in senior office. The country was also the first in the world to democratically elect a woman, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, as president in 1980.

But the European map is anything but even. The strongest performers are concentrated in the north, while several of the weakest are in the east. Türkiye, Romania and Hungary sit at the bottom of the regional ranking, each more than 20 percentage points behind Iceland. Romania’s overall position is dragged down by its political empowerment subindex, where it scores 0.145% and ranks 104th, with the WEF pointing to the absence of mandatory quotas and closed internal party systems. Hungary’s political empowerment score is 0.132%, and the report says it has no women in ministerial positions, which leaves that subindex at 0%.

The European Union, never shy about trying to regulate social reality into submission, wants to narrow the gap further through pay transparency rules, parental leave and flexible working arrangements. Whether more reporting requirements and more Brussels paperwork will do the job is another question entirely. The machinery may hum; the outcome, as usual, is less certain.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com