Vietnam has scored 77th out of 149 countries in terms of progress towards gender parity, a fall in its ranking from last year.
This is according to the World Economic Forum's (WEF) latest Global Gender Gap Report 2018, in which Vietnam dropped from 70th in 2017. The report found that Vietnamese are 0.698 above the global average between gender parity and imparity, with 1 being the highest.
The report measured countries on four categories: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health survival; and, political empowerment.
Of these four, Vietnam ranked highest in economic participation and opportunity, with a score of 0.740, 33rd globally.
According to Asian Correspondent, half of the countries in East Asia and the Pacific region have closed the gap for professional and technical workers, indicating a “relatively successful integration of tertiary educated, higher-skilled women into the labor force." Vietnam was identified as a country where major progress has been made. However, there are still major issues with wage equality for similar work.
The most notable progress has been made in narrowing gender gaps in educational attainment and health and survival rate. When it comes to education fulfillment, the news source shares, there is almost zero discrepancy in both genders gaining access to all levels of education. To date, only four out of 18 surveyed countries in Asia have fully closed their education attainment gender gap. As for the health and survival category, despite Vietnam's outdated preference for having boys over girls, huge improvements have been made in reducing the sex ratio at birth, with the country scoring 0.921 parity out of 1.
The Philippines performed best out of any Asian country in the report, ranking eighth overall.
[Top photo via VOV World]
