THE Philippines climbed to the 20th spot out of 148 economies in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, marking an improvement in its global standing on gender parity.
With an overall gender parity score of 78.1 percent, the report released on Thursday said the country rose five spots from 25th rank in 2024, buoyed by a 0.2 percentage-point increase in its score from last year’s 77.9 percent.
Regionally, the Philippines retained its third-place position in the East Asia and the Pacific block, following New Zealand and Australia, consistent with last year’s performance.
The Global Gender Gap Index annually benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key subindexes: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The Global Gender Gap Index scores can be interpreted as the distance covered towards parity.
In the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, the report said the Philippines has maintained a parity level of around 80 percent for years.
“In 2025, slight improvements in the scores for wage equality and estimated earned income have brought its economic parity score to 79 percent, the highest in Eastern Asia and the Pacific this year,” the report said.
Meanwhile, the Philippines’ score in educational attainment slightly eased to 98.8 percent from 100 percent last year.
“For the first time, the primary school net enrolment rate for boys surpasses that of girls, resulting in a 1.2 percentage-point drop in the education parity score from previous years of full parity,” the report said.
In health and survival, the report said the Philippines has faced growing sex imbalances at birth over the past decade.
The Philippines scored 96.7 percent in the said subindex, inching down from 96.8 percent in 2024.
“The sex ratio at birth (females to males) has declined from 0.944 in 2016 to 0.926 in 2025,” the report said.
In political empowerment, the report said the Philippines’s political parity score of 37.7 percent, from last year’s 37.3 percent, is buoyed by nearly 16 years of female leadership under presidents Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
“This contributes to a 46.2 percent score in the head-of-state indicator, the second highest in the region,” the report said.
“However, progress in female representation in parliament remains modest, with the score at 38.9 percent. The score for ministerial positions has declined to 21.1 percent in 2025, down from over 30 percent in both 2006-2007 and 2023,”
