Nordics lead in eliminating gender inequality

Jordan Wilson

October 17, 2010

5:08pm

A recent survey indexing gender inequality in all the countries of the world found that four Nordic countries were at the top: Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. At the bottom are many Arab and predominantly Muslim countries. The survey measured each country’s division of resources and opportunities between men and women in four areas – economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political attainment, health and survival. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the forum, said, “Low gender gaps are directly correlated with high economic competitiveness. Women and girls must be treated equally if a country is to grow and prosper.” The article goes on to describe where and why other countries ended up on the index. The United States landed in 19^th because of high levels of literacy and education for both women and men. Japan saw a jump of seven places because of higher estimated incomes for women. Lesotho is number eight in African countries because of high female participation in the labor force and more girls than boys attending school. France fell 28 places because it has fewer women in ministerial posts.

This was a good article to see where some of the world’s countries are falling on the scale of gender equality, and even though it did give a brief explanation of why the countries fell where they did, I wish that it had gone deeper into the explanation. It would be helpful, I think, to see how the countries at the top got to where they are so that other countries could figure out how to close their gender equality gap as well. Like we said in class, it’s easy to say that we could just have more seats in the Senate reserved for women, but if we had that, then we’d have to designate a portion of seats for other minority groups. So, for this article to simply say that Trinidad and Tobago have high proportions of women legislators, senior officials, managers, members of parliament and ministers is not very helpful to other nations.

http://www.beatricedailysun.com/news/national/article_7fc5cca6-38ac-55fc-ab03-9c4b6303150c.html