Although these pillars are considered individually, their indicators are deeply interwoven. For instance, education plays a vital role in enabling women to become leaders in government and business; female legislators tend to enact laws that benefit women in the labor force; and violence constrains women’s achievements across the four other pillars.
The GEGI indicates how far we remain from global gender equality—not one country has achieved a perfect score of 100. The highest-ranked country is Iceland, with a score of 85.3; the global average is just 65.1. Countries in the Middle East & North Africa, authoritarian regimes, and low-income countries score the lowest.
Achieving true gender equality will require both de jure and de facto progress across the globe. Laws that prevent women from inheriting, that give men control of income and household assets, that deny women access to education, health care, and financial services, that restrict women’s mobility and exclude them from the labor force, and that protect their abusers and murderers—these laws and more provide the infrastructure for gender discrimination on a broad scale. However, even more sinister are the cultural attitudes that persist in segregating and excluding women on a local and familial level: these norms are harder to target than laws and thus harder to change. Rewriting laws is easy; rewiring mindsets is much more challenging.
