New Study Notes World Gender Gap

Women, especially those in some Muslim countries, lag far behind men in political empowerment and economic participation, despite nearly equaling men in access to education and health, according to a recent study by researchers including Harvard Kennedy School professor Ricardo Hausmann.

The 2008 Global Gender Gap Report, an annual index created by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum, tracks how equitably nations allocate their resources to men and women and creates a benchmark for “national gender gaps on economic, political, education- and health-based criteria.”

Three Scandinavian countries—Norway, Finland, and Sweden—took top honors among the 130 countries in the study, while Saudi Arabia, Chad, and Yemen were deemed the least equitable, ranking 128th, 129th, and 130th, respectively.

The United States ranked 27th, an improvement of four places from its 2007 ranking.

The index was first formed in 2006, and researchers have seen progress in each subsequent year that it has been conducted.

“Of the 115 [countries] we have data for for all three years, only 22 are not making progress,” Hausmann said.

Of those not making progress, Hausmann noted the predominance of nations with Muslim majorities.

“[What is] troubling...is that Muslim countries tend to do much much worse” in the rankings,” Hausmann said. “This is not true for all Muslim countries, but at the bottom of the pile you have Pakistan, you have Yemen, and you have Saudi Arabia...because they have very restrictive legislation on what women can do.”

The overall rankings are based on statistical ratings from 0 to 1 in four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. Each category received equal weight in the index.

Saudi Arabia scored a 0 in the “political empowerment” section, signifying absolute inequality.

Across the board, countries scored the lowest in the political empowerment subsection. The United States, which received strong marks in three categories, including a perfect score in educational attainment, was ranked 56th in political empowerment.

“The highest ranking country in the world is at about 0.82, which means that even the highest ranking country has quite some way to go,” co-author Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum said in an interview with The Guardian.

Hausmann agreed that the political sphere is where the most work remains.

“It is gradually bound to be a more common phenomenon,” he said, “but it is the last domino to fall.”

The study aims to show how countries allocate the resources they have available, so it does not rank countries based on their level of development. Rather than ranking the absolute level of availability of healthcare, for example, the index measures the gap between the access for women and men.

Data for the index comes from the World Bank, ministries of education, United Nations agencies, and the World Economic Forum, Hausmann said.

In addition to the index, the study also profiles each of the 130 countries, highlighting data such as the literacy rate, average number of births per woman, and women’s mean age at marriage.

“In a world of lower fertility and less demand for human [strength],” Hausmann said, “the gender difference is eroding. So gradually we see women take on more equal roles in society.”