Out of almost 200 countries in the world, #28 seems pretty good when looking at the global gender gap. The United States is doing relatively well in the big race, right? As an American, I like to think that I hold myself to a higher standard than that, and I do so for my fellow citizens as well.

28 isn’t so bad, but we can do better. Before we try, though, the biggest issue in returning accurate results from the index would be to universalize the system. Different countries measure this index differently, offering skewed statistics. After a certain point, the data becomes labeled as arbitrary.

Take, for example, the category of “political empowerment.”  A country is given the scored of 1 for a high number of years that a woman has been head of state. This is 25 or over. This means that if one country has had a woman as head of states for 25 years and another country has had a woman as head of state for 60 years, they received the same score.

I think American political ambassadors should put at least a small amount of effort/resources into adjusting this measuring tool, improving it’s accuracy. If we do that, we can get a better read and a better idea on what to fix and how to fix it.