Global Gender Gap Narrows to 68.8% in 2025, says WEF Report

• World Economic Forum has finally released the Global Gender Gap Report 2025 
• The report mentions the global gender gap has narrowed to 68.8%

World Economic Forum has released its Global Gender Gap Report 2025 on June 19. 2025. The report states that the global gender gap has narrowed to 68.8%, the biggest yearly progress since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the report mentions that full parity still is 123 years away at current rates.

World Economic Forum (WEF) managing director Saadia Zahidi said, “At a time of heightened global economic uncertainty and a low growth outlook combined with technological and demographic change, advancing gender parity represents a key force for economic renewal. The evidence is clear. Economies that have made decisive progress towards parity are positioning themselves for stronger, more innovative and more resilient economic progress.”

One of the main discoveries of the report was that at the overall level, high-income economies have closed 74.3% of their gender gap, a bit more than the averages in lower income groups: 69.6% in upper-middle income, 66.0% in lower-middle-income, and 66.4% in low-income economies. But the leaders of the lower income economies have closed more of their gender gaps than more than half of the economies in the high-income group.

Iceland tops the list, among 148 countries, for the 16th consecutive year, followed by Finland, Norway, the UK and New Zealand. South Africa ranks 33 with a gender parity score of 76.7%.

Sub-Saharan Africa is in sixth place regionally in the 2025 Global Gender Gap Index with a gender parity score of 68.0%.

The report by the WEF stated that since 2006, the region has gained 5.6 percentage points in parity score. The region consists of 36 economies and exhibits high heterogeneity in parity outcomes.

The top-ranked nation, Namibia (81.1%), ranks 8th in the world and is the sole Sub-Saharan African economy among the world's top 10 in 2025. Namibia has appeared in the world's top 10 six times historically.

At the lower end of the ranking, Chad is ranked 146 with a score of 57.1%, which means there is a 24-percentage-point difference between the best and worst performers. Twenty economies in the region are among the world's top 100.