Source:Xinhua Published: 2014-10-29 8:39:12
Israel's gender gap widens in 2014, falling 12 spots to No. 65 among world nations in gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum's 2014 gender gap report.
The 2014 figure also marked a 30 spots drop from Israel's position in 2006 when the World Economic Forum started publishing the report.
Despite the slip, Israel once again topped the regional table with Kuwait the closest in the Middle East, ranking 113 overall.
Israel rose to 49 from last year's 82 in the "Educational Attainment" indicator, meaning that women may get more education than men, and jumped from 57 to 49 in "political empowerment."
However, the country dropped 30 spots to 90 in the "economic participation and opportunity," one of the main indicators of the overall gender gap, meaning that women are not fairly integrated into the economic market, and also slid down to second to last ( out of 130 countries) in the "wage equality for similar work" indicator, the survey showed.
Outside of Israel, the Nordic countries enjoyed most gender equality with Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark securing the top five spots on the list, while Yemen, Pakistan and Chad reached the bottom of the list.