Recently, Indian Industrialist Mukesh Ambani was ranked 13th in Forbes’ ‘Top 20Â Billionaires’ list which was a proud moment for India. But apart from this particular list, the country’s performance in other rankings has been quite disappointing. We ranked 120th in the ‘Healthiest Countries Index’ and 15 Indian cities made it to the 20 ‘Most Polluted’ places in the world.
Ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released its annual ‘Women in Work Index 2019’.
This list examines female economic empowerment figures for the year 2017 across 33 OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The company has taken 5 variables into consideration while compiling this list – gender pay gap, female labour force participation, the gap between male and female labour force participation, female unemployment and female full-time employment rate. A weighted average of all 5 was taken to rank the places.
Here are the Top 10 places in the world for women at work according to the Index
- Iceland
- Sweden
- New Zealand
- Slovenia
- Norway
- Luxembourg
- Denmark
- Poland
- Finland
- Belgium
Where does India stand in this Index?
India isn’t a member country of the OECD and hence not included in the rankings. However, due to its status as one of the world’s largest economies in terms of population, PwC did a special study on the country. If included, India would get the very last rank.
While it is the fastest growing economy in the world and female education has improved by leaps and bounds, there are many factors where India lags behind. These factors were identified as cultural/societal barriers, a rise in sexual harassment at the workplace, a 36% gender pay gap and a low (26%) female full-time employment rate.
The good news is that if we manage to reduce the gender pay gap and encourage more women to work, it will result in massive economic gains and boost in GDP. In recent years there have been many policy changes to make professions gender-inclusive. It is high time that these get implemented and executed for India to match up to the rest of the world.