96% of the biggest employer companies in India do not measure income disparities.
The fairer sex seems to be playing second fiddle to men, according to the ‘India Gender Gap Review’, released on Monday by the World Economic Forum (WEF) at the India Economic Summit. The review is an analysis of the inequalities between men and women across the world, in terms of health, education, economic participation and political empowerment in 134 countries, and also looks at where India stands.
The ‘India Gender Gap Review’ presents, in particular, the results of a comprehensive survey assessing the current state of gender-related corporate policies and practices in India.
Increasing data by the World Bank and the United Nations (UN) has, apparently, claimed that there is a direct proportion and relationship between investment in women and economic growth and in some cases, even decrease in corruption.
Speaking on the issue, Melanne S Verveer, US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, said, “We need more cross-collaboration between business houses and NGOs, as challenges relating to social upliftment cannot be handled by just one party.”
She went on to say that gender equality project’s focus on India brings up some interesting facts about corporate trends in the country, such as, for example, women earn one-third of what a man earns on an average. The review looked at the 100 biggest employer companies in India and found that 96 per cent of these companies do not measure the disparity in incomes at all.
The first section of the study reveals the underlying concepts employed in generating the global gender gap index. The second provides an examination of India’s performance in 2009 in comparison to other economies such as Brazil, Russia and China, as well as other South Asian economies. The third section is a focus on the trends shown between 2006 and 2009.
And lastly, a detailed country profile that provides a glimpse of where India stands in the 14 variables included in the global gender gap index, as well as other legal and social factors that affect gender parity. India stood last in terms of its health gap, which means that the disparity between the health of a woman as compared to a man in India is much worse than that of any other country.
Also, the education gap index placed India at rank 121, at 127 in terms of education and 24 in terms of political empowerment, where all the rankings were out of 134.
“Women, as half of the human capital of India, will need to be more efficiently integrated into the economy in order to boost India’s long term competitive potential,” said Saadia Zahidi, co-author, of the Forum’s ‘Global Gender Gap Report, 2009 and head of the Forum’s ‘Women’s Leader’s and Gender Parity Programme’.
