Article 3
Global Gender Gap
The global gender gap is the gap between male and female inclusion and obtainment of four areas in life. Those areas are health and survival, political empowerment, educational attainment, and economic participation and opportunity. On the Global Gender Gap Report countries are ranked based off of this system from the smallest gender gap to the largest gap. What is interesting is that every single country has a gender gap. Even Iceland, ranked #1 in the 2017 report, has a gap with a score of 0.878 out of 1.
The U.S. is ranked 49 out of 144 countries with a total score of 0.718. The breakdown of that by the four categories is a rank of 1 for educational attainment with a score of 1.00, 19 in economic participation and opportunity with a score of 0.776, rank of 82 in health and survivability with a score of 0.973, and a rank of 96 in political empowerment with a score of 0.124. Out of the four categories economic participation and political empowerment are what needs to be worked on the most, unless you’re just concerned with the overall ranking and not closing the actual gender gap. Then you’d want to focus on political empowerment and health and survivability. There are many many factors that affect all of these areas of the gender gap for every country.
One factor that hurts US political empowerment of women is a cultural outlook that men are perceived as better and stronger leaders. Another thing that I think is hurting the US ranking of political empowerment is just the fact that its almost impossible to accurately record and report on the data because it can be affected by many factors that have nothing to do with how a country treats women. Lets say in a perfect environment for every political position there is a male and female candidate and 82% of the politicians chosen were male. It may seem as a male bias is coming through, but there are factors such as political affiliation, views, experience, education level, prior history, and many other factors that are used to judge which candidate the better fit for the job. And all of these desired factors differ all across the country from county to county. That’s not even including the fact that there may be fewer women running for offices or any other just pure numbers data. These could create an artificial bias, and when you add that with the perception that males are stronger leaders, you get a wide range of numbers with the highest being a 0.750 and the second highest being 0.576. In America the attitude that men make better leaders is changing slowly and I do believe that in the past election that if it was anyone other than Hillary, we would have seen a female president, if they were qualified.
US’s low ranking in women’s economic participation and opportunity has probably the most reasons why it could be a certain way. But just like political empowerment, its impossible to get the whole picture, if not even more impossible. Even with all education and majors and career choices being put even and trying to make the comparison as fair as possible, even pay within companies can be drastically different between one person and the next just due to when they came on the job, how well they negotiated a salary, and a bunch of other components. One thing that I think can concretely be explained and agreed upon is that women must choose between having a career or a family in America. Even if a woman is having a great career and doing a perfect job and is pulling overtime and all of that stuff that employers like to see, if she has to miss 12 weeks of work for maternity leave. That puts her 12 weeks behind the competition, and that’s just the minimum by law number in America. That’s 12 weeks of unpaid leave also that hurts her average salary when her salary could be put against a man’s. I’m not really sure there is much that can be done by this in a free economy. If it becomes required by law that those 12 weeks of maternity leave is paid for like in other countries, businesses and companies will just want to hire less females because its costlier and you get less work out of it. Even if the government subsidizes it, businesses still don’t get that 12 weeks of work, and if government puts a quota on females businesses have to hire, that doesn’t end up well for anyone because it will turn out just like affirmative action where the best person for the position isn’t hired and even if you are the best person for the position, if you’re a female, you’ll be looked at as if you only got that position because they were a female and not by their worth. Its just bad for both parties.
Im just going to quickly wrap up comparing the top 3 and bottom 3 countries because I spent way too much time on America and am closing in on the deadline. But the top 3 countries have historically been very equal countries between the two genders. Iceland, Norway, and Finland are all Nordic countries in which females even had more freedom than men in some situations and men and women were very equal because survival in those harsh environments depended upon it. In the bottom 3 countries Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria have a very different view towards women even today. Women are seen as subservient to males and have very little freedom. They can’t even walk outside to buy groceries without a male escort. Males can have multiple wives, beating your wife is seen as normal, and honor killings can just occur on the streets. I’m sure the region was male dominated before Islam came around, because the Bible and the Quran both have the same background of women being seen as servants to their husbands and they get that from their time and place of origin. However when an entire country is extremely religious it definitely hurts women when the bible or Quran can be used as divine justification for their treatment of women. America was able to get away from it by the separation of church and state even with it being a Christian based society. In Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria there is no separation of church and state.