Malta has climbed 15 places globally in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report but has only climbed one place in the EU28 context, becoming the second worst performed in the EU. Last year Malta placed last among the EU 28 and ranked 108 globally, out of 144 countries.

A slight increase was registered in all 2017 scores for all four sub-indices compared to 2016, the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality (NCPE) said.

The Global Gender Gap Report “was developed in part to address the need for a consistent and comprehensive measure for gender equality that can track a country’s progress over time”.

It uses four sub-indices to measure the gender gap – (i) economic participation and opportunity, (ii) educational attainment, (iii) health and survival, and (iv) political empowerment.

The score for economic participation and opportunity has been steadily increasing since 2015 mainly in the gap in labour force participation, wage equality for similar work, estimated earned income and legislators senior officials, and managers.  On the other hand, Malta scored slightly lower than in 2016 when it comes to the gap in professional and technical workers.

The same can be noted for the sub-index of health and survival which remained unchanged in sex ratio at birth while there was a slight increase in healthy life expectancy.

Political empowerment is still an area of concern. A decrease in 2017 scores is noted where women in parliament and ministerial positions are concerned, whereas a steady increase since 2015 has been achieved for the indicator looking at number of years with female head of state.

As in 2015, Malta once again ranked 1st globally in all indicators of the educational attainment sub-index, achieving the highest possible score of one (1) in all indicators falling under educational attainment.

The NCPE noted that the results for Malta as published in the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report point to both progress and challenges in relation to gender equality. “Economic participation and political empowerment still need to be addressed. This is being acknowledged at government level through stronger policy to address these areas of concern as can be seen in the positive impact of initiatives undertaken in the last years.  NCPE looks forward to more focused actions in order that the gender gap in the different sectors narrows and Malta continues to register progress in the coming years.”