How Big Is the Global Gender Gap? Depends Which Number You Look At

As of 2015, girls entering school were expected to complete a little over 12 years of schooling on average worldwide, outpacing their male classmates for the first time. Compare that to 1970, when boys spent almost two years longer in school, on average

Maternal deaths as a share of live births have fallen by 44 percent since 1990 and by even more in the least developed nations. But the rate there is still twice as high as the global average. Of particular worry is Sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate of maternal deaths remains up to six times higher than the rest of the world in some places.

Globally, nearly 83 percent of adult women were literate as of 2016, a huge increase from the 1970s when only around 61 percent were. While this is still less than the 90 percent literacy rate among adult men, the relative gap has narrowed significantly. Sixty-four countries, or around one in four, had female adult literacy rates above 90 percent.

Management positions are more likely to be held by women compared to twenty years ago, though parity is still a long way off. Eastern Europe and Central America generally performed best on this metric.

Women in “low income” countries were living 78 percent as long as women in “high income” countries by 2016, up from 57 percent in 1960. Women outlive men, on average, in every country, by as little as a few months in Bhutan to nearly 11 years longer in Russia.

Women held a little more than one in five legislative seats worldwide in 2017, double their share in 1995. In developed countries, women had closer to one in three seats. Only two countries had majority-female legislatures in 2017: Rwanda and Bolivia.

The share of women participating in the workforce globally has fallen over the past few decades, from a little over 51 percent in 1995 to less than 49 percent in 2015. But an even larger drop in male labor-force participation over that same period means the gap has narrowed somewhat. Besides wealthier Scandinavian countries, those closest to parity were almost all in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2017, women were making 58 percent as much as men were, as measured by gross national income per capita, up from 44 percent in 1995. Of the 25 countries where women earned at least 75 percent of what men did, 15 were in Africa.

Available data on the share of female university graduates in so-called STEM fields—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—shows a decline for all but tech majors over the last 20 years.

Women globally were unemployed at a rate 0.9 percentage point higher than men in 2018, up from a 0.6 percentage point gap in 1991. Many individual countries have seen real improvements, however, with women now experiencing lower unemployment rates than men in 24 New Economy countries, including China, Russia and Nigeria.