Gender Equality in Knowledge Societies — Summary for Policymakers
The GEKS Key Findings document distills the main conclusions of the Gender Equality in Knowledge Societies benchmarking initiative into a concise policy-facing summary. Where the full GEKS Scorecard provides the complete methodology and country-level data, this document is designed for rapid absorption by ministerial staff, science agency heads, and development organization program officers who need a reliable summary of the evidence without working through the full technical report.
Key findings from the GEKS initiative document a persistent "leaky pipeline" across countries at all income levels: women's representation is highest in early STEM education and declines consistently at each subsequent level — undergraduate enrollment, graduate research, postdoctoral positions, academic faculty, and senior leadership in research institutions and science policy bodies.
The findings also document significant variation between and within regions. Countries with similar overall development indicators show substantially different outcomes for women in knowledge economies, suggesting that policy choices — rather than structural economic factors alone — drive much of the observed variation. This finding has important implications for policy design: it shifts the burden of proof from "can we improve women's participation?" to "which policies work, and in what combinations?"
The Key Findings document is intended to be read alongside the national scorecards for India, the Republic of Korea, and South Africa, which provide the country-level evidence base for the comparative conclusions.