By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan climbed off the floor of the World Economic Forum’s annual gender-parity ranking this year, posting its steepest improvement in a decade even as the country remained mired near the bottom of a 145-economy field.
The South Asian nation closed 59.5% of its overall gender gap in the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2026, up 2.8 percentage points from 56.7% a year earlier, according to the Geneva-based organization’s 20th annual edition of the index, released this week. The gain lifted Pakistan to 143rd place, five spots above last year’s last-place finish, though it still sits third from the bottom of the rankings — ahead of only two economies among those assessed.
The improvement marks Pakistan’s largest single-year gain since the index began tracking the country in 2006, when its parity score stood at 54.3%. Two decades on, that leaves Pakistan having closed just 5.2 percentage points of its gender gap — a pace of progress that trails most of the 145 economies the WEF surveyed this year, even as those economies collectively pushed global gender parity to a record 69.2%, up 0.4 percentage point from a year earlier.
Pakistan continued to lag every other lower-middle-income economy and South Asian nation in the survey, ranking last among the 38 countries the WEF classifies as lower-middle-income and last among the seven South Asian nations it tracks, underscoring how far the country remains from regional and income-group peers even after its rebound.
“While Pakistan remains among the lowest-ranked economies in the index, it has nonetheless narrowed its gender gap over time by 5.2 percentage points, up from 54.3pc in 2006,” the WEF said in the report. The improvement this year was concentrated in one area, the organization said: “The 2026 edition marks its strongest year-on-year improvement in a decade, driven primarily by substantial gains in educational attainment.”
Education Drives the Gain, Workforce Gap Persists
Educational attainment supplied the bulk of Pakistan’s advance, with the country’s parity score in that category climbing to a record 91.7% and its global rank rising to 130th. Boys’ primary-school enrollment stood at 83.01%, versus 81.08% for girls, while secondary enrollment showed a similar pattern — 49.99% for boys against 46.48% for girls. Male literacy was recorded at 69.14%, compared with 48.52% for women, leaving a gap of more than 20 percentage points despite the sector’s overall improvement.
One metric bucked the pattern entirely: tertiary education, where Pakistan ranked first globally for gender parity, with 11.01% of men and 10.71% of women enrolled — figures close enough to register as near-total parity, even as they reflect a system in which relatively few of either sex reach university.
Economic participation showed a more modest advance. Pakistan rose three places to 144th in that category, still one of the weakest pillars in its overall score. Labor-force participation stood at 81.46% for men against just 28.21% for women, a gap of more than 53 percentage points. The imbalance widened further up the income ladder: 93.87% of legislators, senior officials and managers in the country’s workforce were men, versus 6.13% women, though the divide narrowed somewhat among professional and technical workers, where women held 30.96% of positions.
Wage and ownership data pointed to a similar pattern. Pakistan ranked 115th in wage equality for similar work and 140th in estimated earned income. Female-majority ownership applied to just 4.9% of firms, and only 3.4% of firms reported having a female top manager.
Political Representation, Health Metrics Mixed
Pakistan ranked 107th in political empowerment, with men holding 78.31% of parliamentary seats to women’s 21.69%, and an even steeper imbalance in the cabinet — 96.55% of ministerial positions held by men against 3.45% held by women. The country fared better on one measure within that category: with a female head of state having governed for a cumulative 4.73 of the past 50 years, Pakistan ranked 39th in that subindex, well ahead of its standing in the other three pillars.
In health and survival, where Pakistan ranked 127th overall, the country posted a rare top-tier result: first place globally in sex ratio at birth, reflecting near-equal numbers of male and female births. Healthy life expectancy showed a narrower gap than most other categories — 57.1% for men versus 56.69% for women.
Beyond the four core pillars, the WEF’s report flagged a series of legal and social constraints facing women in Pakistan. Inheritance rights for widows and daughters remained unequal, the report found, while women held “near-equal rights” in access to financial services and in ownership of land and non-land assets. Access to justice was rated “restricted,” and the right to divorce was classified as “unequal,” even as freedom of movement was assessed as an area of “equal rights.”
The report also found that 24.9% of women in Pakistan reported having experienced gender-based violence at some point in their lives, and it rated women’s reproductive autonomy in the country as “restricted.”
Pakistan’s advance came against a backdrop the WEF described as one of hard-won but fragile progress worldwide. Global gender parity reached its highest recorded level in the 20-year history of the index this year, the organization said, even as it cautioned that full parity remains roughly 120 years away at the current pace. WEF Managing Director Saadia Zahidi said gender parity, while foundational to growth and competitiveness, is “not inevitable.”
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