The global gender gap index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education, and health-based criteria. In 2025, the country offering the most gender equal conditions was Iceland, with a score of 0.93. Overall, the Nordic countries make up 3 of the 5 most gender equal countries worldwide. The Nordic countries are known for their high levels of gender equality, including high female employment rates and evenly divided parental leave. Sudan is the second-least gender equal country Pakistan is found on the other end of the scale, ranked as the least gender equal country in the world. Conditions for civilians in the North African country have worsened significantly after a civil war broke out in April 2023. Especially girls and women are suffering and have become victims of sexual violence. Moreover, nearly 9 million people are estimated to be at acute risk of famine. The Middle East and North Africa have the largest gender gap Looking at the different world regions, the Middle East and North Africa have the largest gender gap as of 2023, just ahead of South Asia. Moreover, it is estimated that it will take another 152 years before the gender gap in the Middle East and North Africa is closed. On the other hand, Europe has the lowest gender gap in the world.

In a survey conducted in 2019 by IPSOS respondents in Great Britain were asked about most important areas to achieve equality between men and women in the next 25 years. 36 percent of the respondents stated that more progress should be made in terms of women representation in government and politics, compared with 4 percent who believed there is no need to achieve equality.

Women researchers have been shown to be underrepresented in science, especially among the most productive scholars. This is especially relevant in the social sciences and humanities fields, where gender parity is closer, but disparities among top scholars are still pronounced. The gender gap in the field of communication has been explored from several approaches, but studies focusing on gender differences in representation, citations, and h-index are rather scarce. Drawing upon data retrieved from SciVal, we conducted a comparative study of the top 500 and top 100 most productive scholars (N = 5000) for each of the ten most productive countries in communication research in the 2019–2022 period: the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Spain, Germany, India, Australia, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands. The results indicate a consistent underrepresentation of women, particularly among the top 500, across countries. Despite women being cited more frequently than men in some countries over shorter time frames, a gender bias persists favoring men, particularly when considering the h-index. All in all, our study shows that, despite hints of gender equality in citation patterns, the gender gap still constitutes a structural part of the field of communication when addressing gender representation in research productivity and long-term dynamics of research impact.

Men in the European Union earned approximately 13 percent more than women in 2022, with Estonia having the biggest gender pay gap of 21 percent and Luxembourg having the lowest at minus 0.7 percent, meaning that on average women actually earned more than men in Luxembourg during that year.

Women researchers have been shown to be underrepresented in science, especially among the most productive scholars. This is especially relevant in the social sciences and humanities fields, where gender parity is closer, but disparities among top scholars are still pronounced. The gender gap in the field of communication has been explored from several approaches, but studies focusing on gender differences in representation, citations, and h-index are rather scarce. Drawing upon data retrieved from SciVal, we conducted a comparative study of the top 500 and top 100 most productive scholars (N = 5000) for each of the ten most productive countries in communication research in the 2019–2022 period: the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Spain, Germany, India, Australia, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands. The results indicate a consistent underrepresentation of women, particularly among the top 500, across countries. Despite women being cited more frequently than men in some countries over shorter time frames, a gender bias persists favoring men, particularly when considering the h-index. All in all, our study shows that, despite hints of gender equality in citation patterns, the gender gap still constitutes a structural part of the field of communication when addressing gender representation in research productivity and long-term dynamics of research impact.

Gender representation among the top 500 and 100 most productive scholars in the ten most productive countries in communication assuming real proportions coming from the pooled sample.

The Gender Equality Index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education, and health-based criteria among the countries of the European Union. A score of 0 indicates that there is no gender equality, while 100 points indicate that gender equality is achieved. In the 2024 index, the leading country was Sweden with 82 points. Denmark and the Netherlands were the second and third most gender equal countries. Considering the other side of the spectrum, Romania only scored 56.1 points, way below the EU average of 70.2. Other countries at the bottom of the ranking were Hungary and Romania. Equality in health Not only does the index measure gender equality on national levels, it also breaks down gender equality into different dimensions. With an index score of 88 points, health was the most equal dimension among men and women within the EU, followed by money and work. To the contrary, power was considered the most unequal dimension, along with knowledge and time management. The Global Gender Gap Index From a global perspective, Iceland is considered the most gender equal country. Dominating this list are the Nordic countries: Norway, Finland, New Zealand, and Sweden rank in the top 5. As of 2024, it was estimated that Europe had closed 75 percent of its gender gap, making it the most successful region in the world, before North and Latin America. Nevertheless, experts predict that gender parity will not be achieved in the region for another 67 years.

Gender differences in citations and h-index across countries for the top 500 and top 100 most productive scholars.

An influential body of work has identified a ‘welfare-state paradox’: work–family policies that bring women into the workforce also undermine women’s access to the top jobs. Missing from this literature is a consideration of how welfare-state interventions impact on women’s representation at the board-level specifically, rather than managerial and lucrative positions more generally. This database includes data that contribute to addressing this ‘gap’. It compiles existing secondary data from various sources into a single dataset. Both the raw and 'fuzzy' data used in a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 22 industrialised countries are available. Based on these data, analyses reveal how welfare-state interventions combine with gender boardroom quotas and targets in (not) bringing a ‘critical mass’ of women onto private-sector corporate boards. Overall, there is limited evidence in support of a welfare-state paradox; in fact, countries are unlikely to achieve a critical mass of women on boards in the absence of adequate childcare services. Furthermore, ‘hard’, mandatory gender boardroom quotas do not appear necessary for achieving more women on boards; ‘soft’, voluntary recommendations can also work under certain family policy constellations. The deposit additionally includes other data from the project that provide more context on work-family policy constellations, as they show how countries performance across multiple gendered employment outcomes spanning segregation and inequalities in employment participation, intensity and pay, with further differences by class.

While policymakers in the UK and elsewhere have sought to increase women's employment rates by expanding childcare services and other work/family policies, research suggests these measures have the unintentional consequence of reinforcing the segregation of men and women into different 'types' of jobs and sectors (Mandel & Semyonov, 2006). Studies have shown that generous family policies lead employers to discriminate against women when it comes to hiring, training, and promotions, as employers assume that women are more likely to make use of statutory leaves and flexible working. Furthermore, state provision of health, education, and care draws women into stereotypically female service jobs in the public sector and away from (better-paid) jobs in the private sector. Accordingly, research suggests that the more 'women-friendly' a welfare state is, the harder it will be for women - especially if they are highly skilled - to break into male-dominated jobs and sectors, including the most lucrative managerial positions (Mandel, 2012).

Yet, more recent evidence indicates that women's disadvantaged access to better jobs is not inevitable under generous welfare policies. For instance, women's share of senior management positions in Sweden, where women-friendly policies are most developed, now stands at 36%; this compares to a figure of 28% in the UK, where gender employment segregation has historically been lower (Eurostat, 2018). Thus, the aim of this project is to provide a clearer and fuller understanding of how welfare states impact on gender employment segregation by using innovative methods and approaches that have not been used to examine this research puzzle before.

To this aim, the project is organised into three 'work packages' (WPs). WP1 examines how conditions at the country-level mediate the relationship between welfare states and gender segregation in employment across 21 advanced economies. This includes Central and Eastern European countries, which prior research has tended to overlook. The country-level conditions included are cultural norms, regulations regarding women's representation on corporate boards, and labour-market characteristics. Data will be compiled from the International Social Survey Programme, OECD, Eurostat, the Global Media Monitoring Project, the World Bank, and Deloitte's Women in the Boardroom project. WP2 then investigates how the impact of welfare-state policies on a woman's career progression varies according to her socioeconomic position and the specific economic and social context in which she lives, using regional and individual-level data from the European Social Survey. Subsequently, WP3 carries out systematic comparative case studies to explore in depth the underlying mechanisms that explain why certain welfare states and regions exhibit high levels of gender inequality but low levels of class inequality, while in other places, the opposite is true. Data are drawn from the same sources as for WP1 and WP2, as well as academic literature and other relevant sources (e.g. government websites).

The project is important because its findings will inform policymakers about how their policies affect different groups of women and how to overcome the 'inclusion-inequality' dilemma (Pettit & Hook, 2009), i.e. bring more women into the workforce by providing adequate family policies and...

Bootstrapped OLS regression predicting h-index for the top 100 most productive scholars across the most productive countries in communication.

The highest position of executive power has been held by a woman in just 62 countries since 1960. Since Sirimavo Bandaranaike was first elected Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 1960, the number of women in power has grown slowly, with the fastest growth coming in the past 15 years. As of September 2024, there were 11 countries led by women, with Mexico electing their first female president in 2024, while long-serving figures such as Shiekh Hasina of Bangladesh and Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland have left office. Despite growing numbers of women leaders decades, there has never been more than 17 countries with women in the highest positions of power in a single year, which is less than 10% of the number of men who have held these positions (as today, there are 193 UN member states). Records The women who have served the longest consecutive terms in these positions are Angela Merkel of Germany (16 years, 16 days), Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica (14 years, 328 days), and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia (12 years, 6 days). The longest combined non-consecutive terms were held by Indira Gandhi of India (16 years, 15 days) and Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina (20 years, 234 days). Just 14 countries have had more than one woman in the highest position of executive power, and most of these countries can be found either in the Indian sub-continent or in Europe. Of these 14, Finland, Moldova, New Zealand, and the UK are the only countries to have had three female leaders, although the unique federal system of Switzerland has had five women serve in nine annual-terms as President of the Swiss Confederation. The first woman Prime Minister The first democratically elected female Prime Minister was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, who took over the leadership of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party when her husband was assassinated in 1959. Bandaranaike successfully led her party to victory in three elections, in 1960, 1970 and 1994, however constitutional changes in the 1980s meant that her final term as Prime Minister was spent in a more ceremonial role, while the President now held the real executive power (although the President at this time was also a woman; Bandaranaike's daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga).

Gender representation among the top 500 and 100 most productive scholars in the ten most productive countries in communication assuming equal proportions.

Bootstrapped OLS regression predicting h-index for the top 500 most productive scholars across the most productive countries in communication.

Employees in the United Kingdom were the most satisfied with their employer's gender policies in 2021, among fiffteen countries analyzed in a Statista study on Diversity and equality in European companies. In most of the provided countries however, women were less pleased with their employer's gender policies than men were.

Bootstrapped OLS regression predicting citations for the top 100 most productive scholars across the most productive countries in communication.

The Second World War severely altered the demographic composition of many countries, particularly in terms of gender ratios across certain age groups. For age groups below 14 years, there is little observable impact of the war on gender ratios, however, some countries see a drastic change across older generations, particularly in the Soviet Union. For men in their twenties (i.e. those in their late-teens or early-twenties when the war began), the ratio drops from 98 men per 100 women in the 15-19 age group, to 68 men per 100 women in the 25-29 group.

In addition to the Second World War, these figures are affected by trends in nature and other historical events. For example, women tend to have higher overall life expectancies than men, which typically sees gender ratios widen among older generations. The impact of the First World War is also most-observable in France's gender ratios for those aged in their fifties. Additionally, the gap in ratios remains high for the Soviet Union across older age groups due to the impact of the First World War and the famine of the early 1930s, however the figures for Russia itself are even lower as it was disproportionately affected by the Russian Revolution and famine of the 1920s.

The United States topped the list in 2018 for the country with the highest gap between CEO and worker pay. In that year, for every U.S. dollar an average worker received, the average CEO earned 265 U.S. dollars. India, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the Netherlands rounded out the top five for countries with the highest CEO to worker pay.

The 99 percent

It is a well-known issue that wages for average workers in the United States have been stagnating. Average hourly earnings for American employees, which have been hovering just below 11 U.S. dollars, have not gone up by much over the past year. The federal minimum wage in the United States has been 2.13 U.S. dollars for tipped workers and 7.25 U.S. dollars for non-tipped workers since 2009 and would be much higher today if minimum wage was adjusted for inflation.

The one percent

The gap between normal workers and CEOs is particularly high in the U.S. The richest CEO in 2018 was Elon Musk, with an annual compensation of about 2.84 billion U.S. dollars. America is also home to the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, who is the head of Amazon.com.