Vietnam moves up in global gender equality ranking

With a score of 0.705 on a scale of 1, or closing 70.5 percent of the gender gap, Vietnam has made little progress toward gender equality since last year, according to the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report released last week.

The WEF measured 146 countries and territories on four sub-indexes: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and life expectancy, and political empowerment.

Vietnam ranked highest in economic participation and opportunity (31st) with 26.74 million women joining the labor force compared to 29.41 million men, but achieved negative change in the category.

It showed “mild improvements” in all other sub-indexes.

“While parity in technical and professional workers has been maintained, the share of women in legislator, senior and manager roles decreased approximately by 1 percentage point. Estimated earned income also fell in higher proportion for women (-20.7 percent) than men (-18.3 percent).”

Vietnam ranked 88th in educational attainment.

Of all science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) university graduates, 36.51 percent are female.

In political empowerment index where it is ranked 106th, there was a 3.6 percentage-point increase in the share of women in parliament, although men continued to occupy 100 percent of ministerial positions.

Of the 499 members elected to the National Assembly for the 2021-26 term, 151 are women, accounting for 30.26 percent.

The country ranked 141st in health and survival index.

Iceland took the lead in gender equality with a score of 0.908, followed by Finland, Norway and New Zealand. Afghanistan ranked worst followed by Pakistan.

In terms of region, North America led by closing 76.9 percent of its gender gap, closely followed by Europe (76.6 percent) and Latin America and the Caribbean (72.6 percent).

Central Asia and East Asia and the Pacific were toward the middle at 69.1 percent and 69 percent followed by Sub-Saharan Africa with 67.9 percent.

Trailing Sub-Saharan Africa by over 4 percentage points was the Middle East and North Africa (63.4 percent).

South Asia was last at 62.4 percent.