Egypt remains near bottom of global gender gap ranking despite nominal gains

Egypt climbed one place to 138th out of 145 countries in the World Economic Forum’s latest gender gap index.

Former Minister of Planning, Economic Development and International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat speaking at the WEF, via Flickr

Egypt ranked 138^th out of 145 economies in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2026 Global Gender Gap Index, remaining among the bottom 10 worldwide despite recording its strongest year-on-year improvement in economic participation in several years.

The Global Gender Gap Report, published on September 16, found that Egypt had closed 63.2% of its overall gender gap, up 0.7 percentage points from 62.5% in 2025, which raised its ranking by just one place from 139th.

That improvement, however, left Egypt with the eighth-lowest overall score among the 145 economies covered.

Since the index began in 2006, Egypt has narrowed its overall gender gap by 5.3 percentage points, with the WEF attributing most of the long-term improvement to education and political representation.

Notably, the index does not measure women’s absolute living standards or rights. It compares outcomes for women and men in economic participation, education, health, and political empowerment, generally calculating female-to-male ratios and measuring how close they are to parity.

The Forum also warns that some underlying statistics can lag current conditions because of differences in national and international data collection.

In terms of Economic Participation and Opportunity, Egypt recorded its largest improvement, with its score rising from 40.6% in 2025 to 44.8% this year.

According to the report, the change was driven mainly by a 7.4% improvement in labor force participation parity, which reached 33.6%, and a 9.5-point increase in estimated earned-income parity, to 27.9%.

Still, large structural gaps remained, as Egypt ranked 14^th for labor force participation parity, 139^th for estimated earned income, and 129^th for women’s representation among legislators, senior officials, and managers. Women’s representation among professional and technical workers produced a parity score of 54.8%.

Even after this year’s rebound, Egypt has improved its economic parity score by only 3.2 percentage points since 2006, leaving it among the world’s weakest performing economies on the measure over the index’s 20 editions.

The result broadly reflects the central contradiction in Egypt’s gender indicators: women have reached or surpassed parity with men in several stages of education without securing comparable access to paid employment, income, or representation in senior positions.

In terms of Educational Attainment, Egypt saw a negligible improvement, achieving a score of 96.9%, which marks a rise from last year's score of 96.8%, elevating its global rank to 110^th from 111^th.

The country maintained full parity in primary and tertiary enrollment, and secondary school enrollment reached 97.9% parity, while adult literacy stood at 85.9%, up from 68.7% when the index began in 2006.

Health and Survival was virtually unchanged at 96.9%, placing Egypt 78^th.

Political representation, however, moved in the opposite direction, as the Political Empowerment score fell from 15.7% in 2025 to 14.2% this year, while its ranking slipped from 101^st to 105^th.

The report puts parliamentary parity at 36.7%, compared with just 2% in 2006, but ministerial parity at only 11.5%.

The decline continues a recent reversal in cabinet representation, after last year’s report found that women’s share of ministerial positions had already fallen from 18.8% to 13.3%, contributing to a drop in Egypt’s political empowerment score that year from 17.6% to 15.7%.

Feminist researcher Merhan Fouad of the New Woman Foundation (NWF) told The Cairo Report that “numbers alone are not indicative of women’s empowerment.”

“Political empowerment is largely symbolic,” Fouad said. “Female MPs will not necessarily focus their work on bettering women' s conditions. We have spent years trying to get the anti-violence against women law into parliament to be discussed, and so it’s an ongoing process to negotiate with women in parliament on the off chance they might be willing to pick it up.”

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Fouad also explained that this representation is largely tied to class.

“The women who do become ministers or MPs belong to a specific class. They had access to education, including a good university, or their family was well connected, a minister father, for example, which enabled them to reach ‘leadership’ positions,” she said.

She stressed that the parliamentary “quota” for women was supposed to be a starting point, much like the “quota” for women in the judiciary. These women, most of them belonging to a particular class, were supposed to pave the path for and “empower” women from the working class.

A fight for a seat at the table should not have ended with the securing of a single seat.

“Not every woman represents women. Women can be patriarchal or believers of state feminism; she will not seek to defend working class women,” Fouad concluded.

The country’s performance also sits within a region that remains the furthest from overall gender parity.

The Forum gave the Middle East and Northern Africa a parity score of 62.5%, up only 0.2 percentage points from 2025 and last among the eight regions included in the index.

At the current rate of progress, the report estimates that the region would take a staggering 182 years to reach parity.

Economic participation remains particularly weak across the region, where only 44.8% of the gap has been closed, and labor force participation parity has actually declined since 2006, from 38.5% to 32.2%.

Egypt’s 2026 economic score of 44.8% therefore matches the regional average almost exactly, despite its supposed improvement from last year.

The latest figures arrive a week after The Cairo Report had examined the New Republic’s officials’ continuous description of the past decade as a “golden age for women.” That article looked beyond legislative changes and formal representation to women’s declining labor force participation, unpaid and informal work, austerity, access to justice, and the treatment of women who publicly report abuse.

The index’s four pillars—economic participation, education, health, political empowerment—are built on formal-sector and formal-institution metrics. The informal economy, which accounts for roughly 40% to 50% of the country’s GDP, over 90% of the private sector’s output in Egypt, and over 60% of all employment, along with unpaid domestic, care, and reproductive labor, is all unaccounted for. This is not something the WEF seems to be particularly interested in exploring, however, because doing so would mean indicting capital.

Additionally, these four pillars focus on women from backgrounds with means, which makes it more of a measure of whether elite positions are divided “equally” between men and women. Equal representation in a CEO class is still a CEO class; a small stratum of professional class women is “empowered” while the structure that produces inequality for working class women remains not only untouched, but also invisible.

The WEF report ranks 145 countries against each other, naturalizing uneven development as a matter of national policy choices rather than global economic structure. In Egypt’s case, decades of austerity, IMF conditionality, and neoliberal policies, all championed by the WEF, have depressed women’s formal economic participation and political power.

That being said, the WEF report still generates useful data. And while acquiring a “seat at the table” is by no means indicative of women’s empowerment, it remains a laborious and exhaustive action in the right direction—a door where, otherwise, there was a wall.