Pakistan among four worst nations for women on Global Gender Gap report 

Islamabad: Pakistan has slipped two spots since last year to rank 153rd out of 156 countries on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2021, published this week. 
Women make up 7% of Pakistan’s labor force, the third-lowest figure globally, according to the World Bank, which has pushed for more childcare and a crackdown on sexual harassment to get more women out to work and boost economic growth.
The South Asian nation was ranked as the sixth most dangerous country for women in a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll in 2018, with hundreds of women and girls killed each year by family members angered at perceived damage to their “honor.”
In the WEF’s 2021 report, Pakistan featured among the bottom 10 countries in two of the four sub-indexes: economic participation and opportunity (152nd) and health and survival (153rd).
“Pakistan ranks 153rd out of 156 countries assessed on the index this year, with its gender gap having widened in this edition by 0.7 percentage points, to 55.6%,” the report said, recording large income disparities between women and men in the South Asian nation. 
“On average, a Pakistani woman’s income is 16.3% of a man’s. Further, women do not have equal access to justice, ownership of land and non-financial assets or inheritance rights,” the report added. 
However, it also noted some improvement in the share of women who were in professional and technical roles, 25.3%, up from 23.4% in a previous edition of the index. 
The WEF said only 46.5 percent Pakistani women were literate, 61.6 percent attended primary school, 34.2 percent attended high school and 8.3 percent were enrolled in tertiary education courses.
“Pakistan has closed 94.4% of its Health and Survival gender gap, negatively impacted by wide sex ratio at birth (92%) due to gender-based sex-selective practices, and 85% of women have suffered intimate partner violence,” the report read.
The report showed Pakistan’s rank as relatively higher for political empowerment but women’s representation among parliamentarians (20.2%) and ministers (10.7%) remained low.