Iceland has world’s smallest gender gap

Saudi Arabia has improved the most for economic participation and opportunity, Burkina Faso for educational attainment, Georgia for health and survival, and UAE for political empowerment.

Many Americans have claimed the United States is an exceptionally progressive nation for years.

“The Index does not seek to set priorities for countries but rather to provide a comprehensive set of data and a clear method for tracking gaps on critical indicators so that countries may set priorities within their own economic, political and cultural contexts”, Schwab says in the report’s preface. Slovenia jumped 14 spots since past year, from No. 23 to No. 9. The authors of the study credit this fall to slightly “less perceived wage equality for similar work and changes in ministerial level positions”.

The report also notes that none of Egypt’s heads of state in the past 50 years has been a woman – a characteristic shared with countries such as Sweden and the United States, which ranked fourth and 28th, respectively.

The WEF measures each country’s gender gap by looking at whether men and women have the same rights and opportunities in health, education, economic opportunity and politics. According to the index, only 19 percent of MPs and 18 percent of ministers are women.

The world’s become better for women – or has it? The country of two millionoffers a few of the most generous paternity benefits in the world, allowing fathers 30 calendar days of paid time off second only to Iceland for length of (compensated) time to spend with a little one. But the U.S.is the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. Reducing gender gaps around wages and workplace representation could generate trillions in additional economic output, a recent McKinsey report showed.

Ten countries-Austria, the Bahamas, Brazil, France, Finland, Guyana, Latvia, Lesotho, Nicaragua, and Namibia-have fully closed the gap on both the health and education. In as many as 100 countries, for instance, women now outnumber men when it comes to enrolment in university education. A quarter of a billion women have entered the world’s labor force since 2006, yet the annual pay for women only now equals the amount men were earning a decade ago. That means, though women enroll in higher education more frequently than men in 97 countries, women comprise the majority of skilled workers in only 68 countries and the majority of leaders in just four, according to the report.

Turkey ranked 109th in terms of women serving as legislators, senior officials and managers in business life, with 87 percent of those holding key positions in professional life consisting of men.