For the twelfth consecutive year Iceland tops the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index rankings. This year Iceland tops in closing the highest proportion of its gender gap at 89.2%, which is 1.5 percentage points more than last year, and 3.1 percentage points ahead of the second-ranked Finland.
According to the World Economic Forum, Iceland’s leadership in the rankings is driven by strong performance across all the four dimensions measured by the index, including having closed already 76% of its Political Empowerment gap, the best performance in the world, while continuing to improve. Iceland has in fact closed political gender gaps by another 5.9 percentage points since last year’s edition.
An important distinguishing factor is the fact that Iceland is one of the few economies where women have been in the highest institutional positions in the economy for almost as long as men in the past 50 years. A woman has been in a head-of-state position in 23.5 of the past 50 years, second only to Bangladesh, where women have been in this role for over 27 years. Further, 39.7% of parliamentarians and 40% of ministers in Iceland are women.
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