Women's World Is Far From Equal

By Tenille Bonoguore
The Globe and Mail

Tuesday 21 November 2006

Nordic Europe is the guiding light for gender equality in the world, topping a global list of 115 countries and laying claim to the world's best maternity leave, the best political participation rates and an education system in which women now outnumber men.

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2006 named Sweden as the world's most progressive country when it comes to quality of the sexes, followed by Norway, Finland and Iceland.

Ranking the countries according to economic participation and opportunity, education, political empowerment and health and survival, Canada came in 13th and the United States ranked 29th. The small Middle East nation of Yemen came last in the global list.

The United States "lags behind many European nations" and also falls behind Canada, mainly due to its average score on political empowerment.

Canada is more consistent across the board, the group says, coming 10th overall for economic participation, 21st for education, 33rd worldwide for political empowerment and 51st for health and survival.

The Geneva-based World Economic Forum is a not-for-profit, non-aligned group. Its annual equity report said the gender gap was close to being eliminated in the realms of education and health, but the social power balance was still vastly skewed towards men.

"Taken together, women in the 115 countries covered by the index - representing over five billion of the world's population - have only 15 per cent of the political empowerment endowed to men," the report states.

The report, released Tuesday, said Sweden is the only country in the world where men and women form equal numbers among all ministers and parliamentarians.

"Women are the majority of all professional and technical workers and at least a third of the legislators, senior officials and managers in all five of the Nordic countries," it states.

At the other end of the spectrum, women in the Middle East had a little over half of the resources and opportunities available to men, the group says.

The Russian Federation came in at number 49, with its ranking battered by a "dismal performance" on female political empowerment.

The Philippines is the only country in Asia to have closed the gender gap on both education and health and was only among five nations in the world to have done so. The others are the Dominican Republic, France, Honduras and Lesotho.

The Global Gender Gap rankings were:

1. Norway
2. Finland
3. Iceland
4. Germany
5. Sweden
6. Denmark
7. New Zealand
8. Slovenia
9. Philippines
10. Ireland
11. Netherlands
12. United Kingdom
13. Canada
14. Slovak Republic
15. Australia
16. Croatia
17. Russian Federation
18. Latvia
19. Sri Lanka
20. Lithuania

-------