Turkey moves down five places in global gender gap rankings

ISTANBUL

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Turkey has moved down five places, ranking 130th among 145 countries, in the “Global Gender Gap Index” released annually by the World Economic Forum, despite a slight increase in its scores. 

The report measures gender gap by evaluating data in four areas: economic participation and opportunity, access to education, political empowerment and health and survival. 

Turkey completed this year with 0.624 points, with zero points indicating complete inequality and one point signifying full equality. 

This score designated Turkey as among the three lowest performing countries in the Europe and Central Asia region alongside Malta (104th) and Armenia (105th). 

The country’s worst performance was under the economic participation and opportunity criteria, where it ranked 131st after the United Arab Emirates, Fiji and Bangladesh. Turkey scored an overall 0.459 points, below the sample average of 0.592. 

According to data, only 32 women participate in the labor force for every 76 men. The figure is even more striking for managerial positions where only 13 women are active for every to 87 men, making the female-to-male ratio 0.15.

Another area where Turkey was comparatively weak appeared to be the political empowerment category, ranking at 105th place and scoring merely 0.103, below the already-low sample average of 0.230.

According to the report, Turkey ranks 86th in terms of the number of female deputies in the parliament and 139th in terms of women in ministerial positions. 

While the country ranks 105th in educational attainment as well, its score is considerably better with 0.957 points, above the average of 0.946. Some 38 countries shared first place in this category by attaining one full point. 

Turkey performed best under the health and survival category, ranking first alongside 40 other countries. This category, however, is based on the sub-indexes of sex ratio at birth and healthy life expectancy. Turkey ranked first in both sub-indexes, alongside 98 other countries in the former and 64 countries in the latter. 

The 2015 Global Gender Gap Index was the 10th edition of the report, the first of which was released in 2006 to measure gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities in countries, regardless of their level of development or the actual levels of available resources. 

Evaluating data gathered in the past decade, the report underlines that while categories of health and education have witnessed considerable improvement, progress on the economic and political fronts have been slow.

“The gap between women and men on economic participation and political empowerment remains wide: only 59 percent of the economic outcomes gap and 23 percent of the political outcomes gap have been closed,” the report said.

While an extra quarter of a billion women have entered the labor force within the past ten years, the annual pay for women only equals what men were earning in 2006. Today, women make $11,000 as opposed to men who earn $21,000.

In a similar vein, while more women enroll at universities in 97 countries, only four countries have a majority of leaders and managers who are women. According to the index, only 19 percent of MPs and 18 percent of ministers are women. 

The figure is equally concerning in Turkey where the number of female deputies represented in parliament hit a record following the June 7 general elections with only 95 deputies out of 550.

This number, however, dropped to 81 after the snap elections on Nov. 1. While the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has 34 female deputies, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has 23, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) 21 and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) only three. The numbers for male deputies for these parties are 317, 59, 134 and 40, respectively.