Published on 16 September 2026, the World Economic Forum’s twentieth Global Gender Gap Report records the highest score in its history: 69.2% of the gap between women and men has been closed. At the current pace, full parity is still 120 years away.
Each year the report compares the position of women and men in 145 economies across four areas: economic participation, education, health and political power. A score of 100% would mean complete equality. The 2026 global score of 69.2% is the highest since the first edition in 2006, yet the Forum describes the progress as “fragile”.
Iceland stays on top
For the seventeenth year running, Iceland ranks first, with 93% of its gap closed. It is followed by Finland, Norway, Namibia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Germany and Ireland.
France is among the countries making the fastest progress. It climbs from 35th to 22nd place, with a score of 0.779. Among the G7, it sits behind the United Kingdom (5th) and Germany (9th), ahead of Canada (24th), the United States (47th), Italy (83rd) and Japan (117th). India ranks 131st.
Fewer women at the top of government
Politics remains the weakest area. The share of countries led by a woman peaked in 2022 and has fallen back to its 2016 level. The number of ministerial posts held by women has risen by 26% since 2008, but their share of the most influential ministries has barely moved.
Education and health tell a different story: many countries are close to parity there. The United States reaches full parity in education, while its score for years with a woman as head of state remains at zero.
Boardrooms and artificial intelligence
In business, women hold fewer than one in five chief executive roles worldwide. In the United States, parity in senior management has fallen by almost 11 points since 2006.
The report also looks at artificial intelligence. Nearly $1 trillion has been invested in AI worldwide, yet fewer than one in five AI engineers are women. The people building tomorrow’s tools are still overwhelmingly men.
“Not inevitable”
Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, stresses that parity is “not inevitable”. To accelerate, she says, governments and employers need to learn from the policies that work and apply them faster.
The 2026 figures show that a country can rise quickly, as France has done. They also show that gains can be reversed: the number of women leading countries has fallen in four years. For a girl born today, full equality would, at this rate, arrive several generations from now.
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