India has dropped to the 131st position out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, slipping two spots from its 129th rank last year. With a gender parity score of just 64.1%, India remains one of the lowest-ranked countries in South Asia. The report measures gender equality across four key areas: economic participation, education, health, and political empowerment.

Despite the overall low ranking, the report shows a slight improvement in India's performance. The country's score in economic participation and opportunity increased by 0.9 percentage points to 40.7%. This progress is mainly due to a better score in estimated earned income, which rose from 28.6% to 29.9%. However, most other indicators remained unchanged.

India’s labour force participation rate for women stayed at 45.9%, the same as last year, which is still the highest ever recorded for the country. While there has been some improvement in certain areas, the data shows that India still has a long way to go in closing the gender gap and achieving true equality between men and women.

While in educational attainment, India scored 97.1% in the Global Gender Gap Report 2025, showing improvement in women’s literacy and higher education enrollment. The country also saw better results in health and survival, with improvements in the sex ratio at birth and healthy life expectancy. However, this parity was reached even though overall life expectancy for both men and women has gone down.

On the downside, India slipped in political empowerment. Women’s representation in Parliament dropped from 14.7% to 13.8%, and the share of women ministers fell from 6.5% to 5.6%, pulling down the country’s score in this area. Among South Asian countries,Bangladesh made the most progress. It jumped 75 ranks to place 24th globally. Other South Asian rankings included Bhutan (119), Nepal (125), Sri Lanka (130), India (131), Maldives (138), and Pakistan (148).

Globally, the gender gap has now closed by 68.8%, the highest improvement seen since the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the report says full gender equality is 123 years away if current trends continue. Iceland remains the top-ranked country for gender equality for the 16th year, followed by Finland, Norway, the UK, and New Zealand.
The report noted positive steps in political empowerment and economic participation, but also pointed out  challenges, such as the lack of women in top leadership roles, with women making up just 28.8% of such positions despite being 41.2% of the global workforce.