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The purpose of this paper is to find the most important factors to the Index that explains gender gaps in education, health, politics, and economic outcomes worldwide.

World Economic Forum (WEF) data are analyzed using hedonic regression analysis to estimate which factors affect a country’s Global Gender Gap Index. Standardized β coefficients reveal the top five factors influencing the Index, just as key components of the US Consumer Price Index are teased out using this method.

Women in public sector management, administration, and politics explain a substantial portion of gender inequality. Policies to increase women’s representation in parliaments, as heads of state, in ministerial positions, and in public sector management mitigate inequality as gauged by the Gender Gap Index. Economic indicators are also among the leading components of the Gender Gap Index.

Although comprehensive and drawn from several sources including the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, and the United Nations Development Programme, WEF data do not capture the full experience of women worldwide. Subsequent qualitative research is recommended.

This analysis reveals policy recommendations for advocates working to close gender gaps, particularly in politics and economic outcomes. Increasing proportions of women in public sector management can mitigate inequality. This supports electoral quotas and human resource management initiatives to diversify management ranks.

Increasing women’s share of public sector managerial positions fosters gender equity, as does increasing women’s share of elected and appointed positions.

This study provides quantitative evidence of the important role of women’s representation to guide subsequent fieldwork. This evidence supports efforts to increase women in elective office and public sector management.

The measurement and comparison across countries of female conditions in labour market and gender gap in employment is a very complex task, given both its multidimensional nature and the different scenarios in terms of economic, social and cultural characteristics. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

At this aim, different information about presence and engagement of women in labour market, gender pay gap, segregation, discrimination and human capital characteristics was combined and a ranking of 26 European countries is proposed through the composite indicator methodology. It satisfies the need to benchmark national gender gaps, grouping together economic, political and educational dimensions.

The results show that female conditions in labour market are the best in Scandinavian countries and Ireland while many Eastern and Southern European countries result at the bottom of classification.

In order to take into account the subjectivity of some choices in composite indicator construction and to test robustness of results, different aggregation techniques were applied.

The authors hope that this new index will stimulate the release of a sort of best practices useful to close labour market gaps, starting from best countries’ scenarios, and the launching of pilot gender parity task forces, as it happened with the Global Gender Gap Index in some countries. Finally, relating gender gap indexes with country policies frameworks for gender inequalities and the connected policy outcomes, it is possible to evaluate their effectiveness and to identify the most adequate initiatives to undertake because policies reducing gender gaps can significantly improve economic growth and standard of living.

The analysis gives a contribution in the evaluation of the policies and regulations effectiveness at national level considering the existing welfare regimes and the associated gaps in labour market. It can help policy makers to understand the ramifications of gaps between women and men. The Gender Gap Labour Market Index is constrained by the need for international comparability, but limiting its analysis to European countries; it has been based on ad hoc indicators concerning developed economies and could be readily adapted for use at the national and local levels.

In this paper the authors propose a new composite indicator index specifically focused on gender gap in labour market. Several papers analysed gender differences in wages, employment or segregation, but few of them consider them together, allowing to get a satisfactory informative picture on gender inequalities in labour market and studying in deep its multiple aspects, including discrimination indicators ad hoc calculated, giving to policy makers an useful tool to evaluate female employees conditions and put them in relation with the different input factors existing within each country.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of women in the small island economy by focussing on the education sector and labour market access. First, we analyse the educational path of women in Mauritius and second we examine the labour market opportunities available to them. We link the two sectors by adopting a gender perspective. Third, we investigate whether the same opportunities are made available to both men and women and whether or not there exist a gender gap in economic participation in the country.

The author used data from the World Bank Development Indicators (2012) for a comparative analysis of the gender situation in Mauritius relative to other African countries. Gender statistics were also made available from the statistical office: statistics, Mauritius. The Global Gender Gap Report (2012) and the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer 2012 were used as secondary data.

The analysis reveals that though girls’ outperform boys at all education levels, starting from primary, secondary and tertiary level, their access to job opportunities are reduced. Female unemployment rate is higher than that of male unemployment and even for those women who manage to enter the labour market, they remain in the low-occupation jobs. This puzzling relationship between good educational performance and female unemployment or low-occupation may first be explained by the wrong choice of subjects at secondary and tertiary levels. Mauritian women are more likely to obtain a degree in education and humanities which are the traditional areas rather than moving to the non-traditional spheres of science and engineering. Hence, not only is it difficult for them to penetrate the labour market which is already saturated in these traditional disciplines but jobs in these fields may not be in the high wage range. Consequently, these subject choices have repercussions for the occupations they choose and the wages they earn. Significant and persistent gaps remain in the fields of study that women and men choose as part of their formal education. These gaps translate henceforth into gender differences in employment and ultimately into differences in productivity and earnings.

No study has focused on the puzzling link between good education performance of girls and their inability to access the labour market in Mauritius.

The purpose of this paper is to present a register‐based index that could provide a practical tool for gathering information and increasing our knowledge on gender equality at organizational level.

Based on Swedish gender policy and information available in public registers, six variables were chosen. For each variable, a gender gap was calculated as the ratio between the sexes, with the larger figure always treated as numerator. The study population consisted of 11,471 persons in 46 companies working in the computer sector, and 32,151 individuals in 77 companies employed in the grocery production sector.

The results show indices of 1.43‐2.09 for the computer sector and of 1.13‐2.14 for the grocery production sector, both with a normal distribution (one is considered fully gender equal and three least gender equal). Added together, the selected variables provide results that are sufficiently different to enable ranking. The variables vary in importance in the two sectors compared. The smallest index variation was for education and salaries; the largest was for parental leave and the number of men and women employed at the companies.

The index is based on public registers, treats men and women symmetrically, and the results generated by the index are easy to communicate to all stakeholders. This research could provide a useful tool for investigating the extent to which men and women differ in certain variables at company level.

The context of sustainable development dwells, quite significantly, upon the one of gender parity in a society and nation. This is so because the issue of gender equality is key to distributive justice, which is in turn much essential for creating a good amount of precondition for sustainable development. Academic inquests into the problem into the gender disparity are indicative of how gender disparity on economic and social parameter triggers a negative productivity change over time and space. Thus, the current chapter brings forth an analytical approach to contemplating into the above-mentioned narratives in both theoretical and empirical terms. The tack of our analysis is as follows. To begin with, this chapter develops an index to determine the extent of gender disparity in health, education and participation in workforce (namely, Gender Gap Index or GGI). Moving on, the study extends to looking at India changing dynamics on gender gap vis-à-vis developing and less-developed countries. Besides, a general equilibrium model has been developed to unfurl the fallout of gender disparity in terms of the wage gap between male and female workers in the labour force, extant and conditioned further by demographic and sociopolitical factors.

This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization measured by trade openness (OPN) and tariffs on women empowerment measured by the gender gap index and gender development index, for two groups of Arab countries divided based on their income levels using annual data for the period 1995–2020. The study also considers other factors that may influence the gender gap, such as GDP growth and the female unemployment rate. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues and explorers whether the effects of trade liberalization differ based on the countries' income levels.

This study employs the fully modified ordinary least squares (FM-OLS) regression model for heterogeneous cointegrated panels to examine the impact of trade liberalization on women empowerment. The study constructs an empirical two regression model of women empowerment measured by the gender gap model and gender development model for the two groups of higher-income countries and lower and middle-income countries.

The authors’ findings reveal that the impact of OPN on the gender gap varies between the two groups of Arab countries where more OPN within the higher-income group may increase the gender disparity, while it may reduce disparity within the lower and middle-income countries. In addition, GDP growth may reduce the gender disparity, while female unemployment raises the gender disparity between the two groups of countries in the long run. Findings also reveal that more OPN, tariffs and female unemployment may reduce gender development within the two groups, but more GDP growth may support the gender development in the long run.

This paper not only assesses the impact of trade liberalization on women empowerment generally, but also assess the women empowerment via two indices that are the gender gap and gender development in Arab countries which is – to the knowledge of the researchers – not yet investigated; further it explores if the effects of trade liberalization differs based on the countries' income levels.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that culture and context (policy and environment) are key factors affecting gender inequalities within and across countries.

This paper applies conceptual and descriptive statistics.

The authors found evidence of increasing gender equality in the workplace, but only for rich countries. Gender inequalities persist in the poorest countries, and the gap between rich and poor countries appears to be widening not narrowing.

This paper demonstrates the need for a comprehensive research program on gender and international business.

The authors provided useful statistics that could possibly be picked up by newspapers. The paper also highlights the need for a more sustained research program on gender and development.

This paper demonstrates that the public perception of increasing gender equality applies only in very high development (rich) countries. In fact, gender inequality rises as economic development levels decline across countries, and the gap between very high and low countries has widened over the past 15 years.

The empirical findings with respect to gender inequality across United Nations Development Program country categories over time are, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, novel and original. Relating the gender inequality gap to culture and context highlights the roles that social issues and the environment play in affecting gender inequality across countries and across time.

The relationship between gender and governance is often neglected in both conceptual and empirical work. However, gender equality in the decision-making fora is vital, for enabling far-reaching social change and for empowering people excluded from decision making. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the participation of women in governance institutions in a small island economy like Mauritius. Though, there has been some progress in Mauritius in redressing the gender imbalance in national and local governance processes, more is still to be achieved. This paper analyses women participation in governance by using gender-sensitive governance indicators.

Data were collected from different sources namely from the Mauritian Electoral Commissioner's Office, Statistics Mauritius, Mauritius Household Budget Surveys and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources. Data were also made available from the Global Gender Gap Report, 2012; the Global Parliamentary Report, 2012 and the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer, 2012. These data were used in the computation of gender-sensitive governance indicators used by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2006). The indicators are the Global Gender Gap Index, the percentage of seats reserved in parliament for women, voter turnout among registered females and prevalence of women in poor districts.

The paper argues that the overall gender gap index for Mauritius has increased over the years but the scores for economic participation and political attainment remain very low. In the economic sphere, the author note a rising female unemployment rate, though girls perform better than boys at all educational levels. Mauritius has been adept at the politics of recognition of different ethnic groups but this approach has not addressed the issue of women. The findings reveal that women are often excluded from decision making, from the household up to the highest levels of policymaking. The “invisibility” of women in parliament, is a concern and is “a grave democratic deficit” for the country (Sachs, 2001).

No study has taken a gender perspective of governance issues in Mauritius. The author assess the importance of gender in a democratic country like Mauritius which has performed well on the economic front but gender is still too often ignored in governance and other spheres. There is thus a growing need for greater gender equality and participation of women in governance institutions and processes.

There is a growing understanding that gender-blind business support measures do not assist women’s enterprise development to the extent that they assist its male equivalent. Focusing efforts specifically on women’s enterprise development, and measuring the impact of those efforts, is paramount. This paper aims to assess the evolution of two indices that analyze high-impact female entrepreneurship development: the Gender-Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) and the 2015 Global Women Entrepreneur Leaders Scorecard. Both utilize data from reliable data sources, yet are limited by the quality and availability of sex-disaggregated data. However, they differ in terms of variable choice, methodology and results.

In this paper, the authors assess the evolution of two indices that analyze high-impact female entrepreneurship development. High-impact female entrepreneurship is defined as firms headed by women that are market-expanding, export-oriented and innovative. The assessment is focused on two new indices, the 2013 and 2014 Gender-GEDI and, the newly created measurement tool, the 2015 Global Women Entrepreneur Leaders Scorecard.

Both indices rely on existing data from reliable, internationally recognized data sets, yet are limited by the sex-disaggregated data that are currently available. However, they differ in terms of variable choice, methodology and results.

There is an increasing need by researchers and policy makers alike to consolidate existing data to better understand the existing barriers for women entrepreneurs and to be able to benchmark change. This paper assesses two indices that provide insights into the conditions for high-impact women entrepreneurs in a country comparative way.