This year’s edition of the Global Gender Gap Report arrives at a decisive moment, with the world in flux. Technological breakthroughs, geopolitical conflict and economic uncertainty are creating unprecedented challenges as well as bringing new opportunities. Amid such change, gender parity is both a principle and a strategy. Diversity of thought, knowledge and experience often lie at the heart of solving problems, starting creative endeavours, and unleashing innovation in teams, organizations and countries. Economies that tap into the full spectrum of their talent and human capital are best positioned to navigate an era of transformation and accelerate productivity and prosperity.

Yet most economies are not fully leveraging this pathway for growth. The report finds that there is still a combined global average gender gap of over 30% across four areas: economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment and health and survival. But there are significant variations across countries, with some economies having closed over 80% of their gender gap and others just over half. With nearly two decades of data, this 19th edition of the report also showcases time series for 100 countries covered since 2006 and reveals countries that have made the fastest progress over time, providing examples to others where the progress to parity may be slower.

At the World Economic Forum, the Centre for the New Economy and Society engages business leaders, leading representatives of government, international organizations, academic experts and civil society in shaping economies and societies that create economic opportunity for all. Its work on gender parity aims to provide consistent measurement of the global gender gap, identify best practices, enable exchange and dialogue between leaders, support the implementation of the most promising solutions, and mobilize collective action to accelerate gender parity. The Centre’s Gender Parity Accelerators support national efforts to scale policies and business-led strategies to improve women’s representation in the workforce and in leadership - and pay equity. The Lighthouse Programme brings together best practices from organizations that have achieved significant, quantifiable and sustained impact for underrepresented groups. The Global Future Council on Investing in Gender Parity brings together expertise on how public and private investments are allocated so that gender parity is realized among investors, investees and as a KPI for investment impact. The Centre’s Global Gender Parity Sprint brings together governments, businesses, international organizations and other stakeholders for a five-year sprint on the road to parity, exchanging insights, building partnerships and mobilizing action to accelerate economic gender parity and deliver economic transformation, innovation and growth.

For this year’s edition of the report, we are grateful to LinkedIn and the World Bank for their collaboration in providing unique data to offer novel insights into gender gaps in the workforce and into legal frameworks, respectively. We also thank the members of the Centre for the New Economy and Society Advisory Board, nearly 200 Centre partners, academic experts, and a network of national ministries of economy, education and labour working with the Centre on advancing gender parity.

We would like to express our gratitude to Silja Baller, Yanjun Guo and Kim Piaget for their leadership of this project. We would also like to thank our colleagues Mauricio Baez-Sedeno, Attilio Di Battista, Eoin O’Cathasaigh, Sam Grayling, Julia Hakspiel, Ximena Jativa, Kateryna Karusnka and Ricky Li for their support.

Investments in parity can help countries build more resilient, prosperous and productive economies. The latest edition of the Global Gender Gap Report seeks to empower decision-makers by measuring the current state of parity and identifying those that have made the largest leaps forward. Change is possible and progress is within reach.