India recently slipped 3 spots to rank as the 131st out of 148 countries assessed in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index 2025. Despite India’s marginal improvement in its gender parity score from 64.1% to 64.4% which represents the percentage of the gender gap closed by the economy. India continues to fall behind in the rankings.
The report’s authors attribute India’s fall in the rankings to the nation’s relatively slow-paced performance in comparison to other economies. India’s gender parity score, an indication of progress being made by the nation towards gender equality, also falls behind the global average (68.8%) and the South Asia average (64.6%).
Despite marginal aggregate improvements in health and education-based indicators, the country continues to trail in political representation and economic participation of women, which is speculated to be the primary cause for it being among the lowest 20 performers globally.
What is the Global Gender Gap Report?
First introduced in 2006, the Global Gender Gap Report is published annually by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The report examines progress being made by nations to reduce gender inequality across four key avenues, including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The report analyses 148 economies covering over 75% of the world’s population across a set of standardised 14 parameters divided into the 4 aforementioned themes.
Education to Employment: A Broken Chain
Despite notable improvements in the category of educational attainment, which included a substantial increase in female enrollments in schools and colleges. Indian women continue to face systematic barriers that bar them from entering the formal economy.
“There’s a growing gap between what women are qualified to do and what they are allowed or enabled to do,” said Aditi Desai, a researcher at the Centre for New Economic Studies. “The system produces capable women, but fails to offer them sustainable and dignified work opportunities. Unemployment among female graduates remains over 40% higher than among their male peers,” she added.
India, the fastest-growing economy in the world, ranks 144 in economic participation and opportunity, placing it among the bottom five globally. According to the report’s findings, women in India still earn nearly one-third less than men for performing the same set of professional responsibilities. This ranking follows India’s modest improvements in women’s estimated earned income, which increased their score for this category from 39.8% in 2024 to 40.7% in 2025.
Explaining the reason behind the gap, Desai said that, “Over the years, India has made commendable strides in extending institutional incorporation for gender inclusion. However, these gains often remain superficial, failing to translate into meaningful agency or outcomes for most women. Many girls drop out after adolescence due to marriage, household responsibilities, or lack of safe transportation.”
“Those who complete their education often face a society and job market that do not accommodate or encourage their economic participation,” she added. Desai further noted that the irony of the situation happens to be that as women become more educated, the rate of their involvement in the labour force continues to stagnate, as women’s labour-force participation rates remain the same from last year (45.9%), replicating India’s highest participation score to date.
Absence of a track to leadership?
Data from LinkedIn reveals that women continue to apply for leadership roles, but hiring has not kept pace. “What we’re seeing is not a pipeline problem, but a blockage at decision-making levels,” Sue Duke, LinkedIn’s Head of Global Public Policy, explained in an interview when asked about declining women’s representation in leadership positions.
Even in sectors like health and education, where they lead in degrees, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions. The report further revealed that women generally face a longer path to leadership when compared to men, requiring them to work in multiple cross-functional capacities before attaining a leadership position.
India’s slip in the rankings
While India’s overall score showed minor improvement, the country continues to lag both globally and regionally, with Bangladesh (24), Bhutan (119), Nepal (125), and Sri Lanka (130) faring much better.
India’s most alarming setback this year comes in the area of political representation. As the percentage of women in Parliament dropped from 14.7% to 13.8%, and the share of female ministers decreased to 5.6%, from 6.5% in 2024. These figures continue to drift away from the 30% high seen in 2019. As per the report, for most economies, progress towards political empowerment has been relatively slow when compared to other avenues.
Limitations of the report
As explained by Desai, such global rankings often use standardised indicators for easy comparability across different nations and cultural atmospheres that can oversimplify context-specific realities. For instance, measuring “economic participation” through formal employment overlooks the vast informal sector in countries like India, where millions of women work without recognition, pay parity or security. As a result, women’s contributions to agriculture, care work, and home-based production are often excluded from the picture. Additionally, the report focuses on gender disparities, but often lacks an intersectional lens, ignoring how caste, religion, region, or disability shape women’s access to rights and resources. In a country like India, where caste and class are deeply tied to gender, the omission of such factors in reports can lead to an incomplete understanding of inequality.
Cause for concern going forward?
India’s gender gap reflects a larger structural mismatch. According to Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data, unemployment among female graduates remains 40% higher than their male peers, revealing that education does not always lead to employment.
Another growing concern is the impact of technological disruption. The World Economic Forum has flagged that women are disproportionately overrepresented in fields most susceptible to AI-led automation, such as clerical, administrative, and customer service roles.
Norman Loazya, Director of the Global Indicators Group, World Bank, stated that the best bet for developing nations to improve women’s accessibility of opportunities would be to improve women’s safety in their states by ensuring better coordination among legal provisions and complementary policies.
“If they don’t feel safe in public transportation, the workplace or when leaving the house in general, they are going to be less willing to take up economic opportunities,” he explained. “Only in 27 out of 190 economies do we see laws that help ensure that women feel safe in public transport,” he added, underscoring the urgent need to build more gender responsive and inclusive public infrastructure and legal protections.
As per National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), crimes against women in India have been on a steady rise since 2018, prompting threats to women’s safety in public spaces, workspaces and even inside their own houses. These trends represent some of the foremost challenges that the country faces on its path to achieving true gender parity.
