Sri Lanka's Reversal on Gender Parity: From Global Leader to Global Outlier

The 2025 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report singles out Sri Lanka as the world’s only backslider on gender parity.

- By Sachintha Fernando

Of the 100 nations monitored consistently over the past two decades, 99 have improved; Sri Lanka is the lone outlier, where the gender gap has widened. This decline is measured through the report’s Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), which tracks disparities between men and women across four dimensions—economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment—assigning each country a score from 0 (maximum gap) to 1 (no gap) since 2006. In 2006, Sri Lanka ranked 13th out of 115 countries ahead of Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and Singapore. Its score was 0.719, indicating that the country had closed 72% of the gender gap across four dimensions. By 2025, it had plunged to 130th out of 148 countries, placing it among the world’s worst performers, with a score of 0.645. Over two decades, it has fallen 117 places and lost 7.5 percentage points, reversing nearly one-tenth of the progress previously achieved. While a drop in rank can sometimes reflect the faster progress of other countries, in this case, the decline is both relative and absolute: Sri Lanka’s score has fallen, not just its position.

Losing the “political premium”

A significant part of this decline stems from the political empowerment sub-index, which is based on three indicators: (1) the ratio of women to men in parliament, (2) the ratio of women to men serving at the ministerial level, and (3) the ratio of years with a female head of state over the past 50 years. For decades, Sri Lanka enjoyed what could be called a “political premium” in this third measure. In 2006, we ranked first in the world here, largely because we were the first country to elect a female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike.