U.S. Ranking in the 2009 Global Gender Gap Report

The most glorious part about living in Washington, DC is knowing that I am within a few miles of some of the worlds most influential women. The unfortunate part is that there are still far men holding influential positions than there are women, at least in terms of political leadership and economic participation.

I have been stuck in my apartment all weekend and caught myself watching hours upon hours of TV...so I decided to get some education reading out of the way --I read the 2009 Global Gender Gap Report. It's really quite startling that the United States ranked 31 in 2009, a significant drop since 2006 when the U.S. was ranked 23. Now, it must be noted that this is an effort to close the gender gap; other countries are simply closing their gender gap much more quickly than the U.S.

Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden are, respectively, in the top four, while countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chad, and Yemen find themselves in the bottom ten (out of 134 countries total).

The report is simply fascinating and can be found here (If you don't want to read the whole thing, I suggest at least flipping to the charts beginning on page 16, as well as the detailed analysis of the United States on page 192).

Here's a brief summary:


Countries are measured on their performance in four sub-indexes: economic performance and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. When measured separately by each sub-index, everything gets far more interesting.

The United States came in at number 17 in the category of "economic participation and opportunity" (that is to say, 16 other countries showed better progress in closing their gender gap than the U.S. in this area). Countries like the Philippines, Mozambique, and even Mongolia (which, by the way, came in first place under this category) ranked in the top 16.

Guess where we ranked in the sub-index "Political Empowerment"....61...yes, you read that correctly. Our super-power country has so many men leading the way, that we rank below 60 other countries...BUT, just above Canada, who came in at 62 (phew!). On the bright side, at least I have heard of all the countries who scored a better ranking than us....maybe that has something to do with our stellar "educational attainment", where we tied for first with a whole slew of other countries.

Why should we care? What difference does it make? This report is designed to open our eyes to the lack of progress we have made closing the gender gap in Washington, DC and throughout the rest of our country.

Women are making progress, and that's all swell, but come on ladies--let's knock this Gender Gap Report to the ground this year...let's jump up to at least 25. Many women are finally coming into situations where they are supremely qualified (through years of experience, education, etc.) to take these high-ranking positions. The more people retire from political positions and CEO positions, the more likely it will be that we will see mind-boggling progress.