Reducing the Gap in Understanding Sri Lanka’s Gender Gap

Abstract

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) is a composite index that measures the extent of gender-based gaps in and among countries and tracks progress towards reducing these gaps over time. Sri Lanka is recorded as taking a nose-dive over the decade in terms of its gender gap, with a dramatically worsening score on the GGGI. This Insight shows that this reduction in Sri Lanka’s score is due to a quirk in the calculation method, which inflated Sri Lanka’s past scores. Adjusting for this anomaly shows that Sri Lanka’s score on the GGGI is better read as having always been rather low, and has in fact remained about the same for over a decade.