The World Economic Forum published a report on gender gaps throughout the world praising countries in which men lag behind women. John Edale deconstructs this report and advocates for true equality not just a different inequality.
Last month the World Economic Forum published its annual Global Gender Gap Report. The report measures the progress that has been made in reducing gender gaps throughout the world in areas such as education, literacy, health and earnings. It then combines the data from these different indicators to produce a Global Gender Gap Index, ranking countries according to their overall performance.
The report received a significant amount of press coverage in the UK, with the BBC even scheduling a month-long “100 Women” season of programs and events to coincide with its release.
The main conclusion of this year’s report is the welcome news that many of the disadvantages facing women around the world are slowly being overcome.
However, for me, the usefulness of the report, and at times even its validity, is undermined by the fact that it takes a strange and openly one-sided approach towards gender equality.
Earlier this year I wrote about the problem of educational underachievement by boys in the developed world, and how reluctant we seem to be to even acknowledge this as a problem let alone try to get to grips with it. I was therefore interested to see what approach the report would take towards this particular gender gap.
The beginning is certainly promising. When explaining the ways in which the Index was calculated the report states that it “ranks countries according to their proximity to gender equality rather than to women’s empowerment. Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen indicators has declined, rather than whether women are ‘winning’ the ‘battle of the sexes’.” (page 4)
However, on the very same page, the report goes on to explain :
“To capture gender equality, two possible scales were considered. One was a negative-positive scale capturing the size and direction of the gender gap. This scale penalizes either men’s advantage over women or women’s advantage over men, and gives the highest points to absolute equality. The second choice was a one-sided scale that measures how close women are to reaching parity with men but does not reward or penalize countries for having a gender gap in the other direction.”
One might imagine that the first scale would be the obvious, common sense choice, and the only one compatible with the aim of ranking countries according to their proximity to gender equality, and yet the report’s authors opt instead for the second “one-sided” scale.
If you are wondering what the reasons for this were then I’m afraid you will have to keep on wondering.
“We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes” is the only explanation the reader is given.
The report is almost 400 pages long. One might imagine that a paragraph or two could have been spared to provide some kind of glimpse into the rationale behind a decision which fundamentally alters the nature of the Index, and contradicts its stated aim.
Whatever the reasons, one of the results of using the second scale is that the large gender gap in educational achievement that has existed throughout the developed world for over two decades simply vanishes. Countries where women achieve more than men educationally are all given the maximum possible score in this category (1.000) when calculating their overall place on the Index.
As well as the main Index, the report goes on to provide separate tables ranking countries according to their performance on each individual indicator. At this point even the commitment not to reward cases in which women are outperforming men is abandoned.
The countries which are ranked highest in each category are not those which have the smallest gender gap, but those which have the largest “reverse” gender gap.
When measuring enrollment in tertiary education (college, university etc) this produces some bizarre results. The number one ranking nation is Qatar with a staggering female to male student ratio of 5.60. The US comes in at 32nd place with a ratio of 1.41, while the UK is 36th with a ratio of 1.38. Over half of the countries surveyed have more female than male students. Apart from suggesting that the term “reverse gender gap” may be a misnomer in this particular area, it also means that those countries which currently have a perfect 1.00 ratio (Switzerland and Guatemala) are relegated to the bottom half of the table. Beneath these are the minority of countries which have more male than female students, with Chad being at the very bottom of the pile with a dismal ratio of only 1 female student for every 4 males.
Perhaps the oddest thing about this whole odd table is that the size of the gender gap in the worst country is surpassed only by the size of the gender gap in the “best.”
Sometimes the language used in describing the results becomes distinctly Orwellian. At one point the report states that “Philippines is the only country in Asia and the Pacific that has fully closed the gender gap in both education and health.” (page 21)
At enrollment in primary education, Philippines has a female to male ratio of 1.02. At secondary education this has risen to 1.19, and at tertiary education to 1.24. By what definition can this be described as a “fully closed” gender gap?
The WEF’s methodology produces some surreal results in other categories too.
In the Healthy Life Expectancy table, the top ranking country is the Russian Federation, where women can expect to enjoy an average of 65 healthy years, compared to only 55 for men.
However, Japan, which has the highest figure of all for women (78 years) is way down in 36th place. Japan’s problem is that its pesky menfolk aren’t lagging far enough behind. They are stubbornly hanging on for an average of 73 healthy years, which is spoiling the country’s ratio.
Thus we have a situation where a country in which both genders enjoy longer, healthier lives, and where the gap between the genders is smaller, is actually penalized in the rankings precisely because the gap is smaller.
If the validity of this logic is accepted then the best thing any man can do to make his country a more equal place is to throw himself under the nearest bus.
Does this back-to-front approach to gender equality really benefit anyone?
Surely organizations like the World Economic Forum are running the risk of discrediting the very notion of a struggle for equality in the eyes of many people who might otherwise have been supportive?
The crime writer Raymond Chandler once said “If you believe in an ideal, you don’t own it, it owns you.”
Too many of today’s guardians and gatekeepers of Equality don’t seem to see things that way. They believe the ideal is theirs to tweak, twist and reinvent as they see fit.
Maybe we need to become more willing to ask them why?
Photo/ Flickr— Neela
“Orwellian” is right. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Inequality is equality. It’s the report’s treatment of life expectancy that bothers me the most. I find that to be really chilling, even cold-blooded, because it’s talking about life and death in a way that could easily veer into a quite genocidal outlook. It sounds like the report is saying that women living longer than men is a great sign of equality and progress. A husband dies before his wife, and that’s a positive step for women. A wife dies before her husband, and that’s evidence of a flawed system. How… Read more »
Either there is something extremely wrong with the report and the people who made it or perhaps alot had been lost in translation, because men dying before women is hardly any news, this has been true for eons. So I really dont know what to say. Incompetence? hidden agenda? ideological idiocy? you name it. But this is so wrong at all level that only gender fascists and few imbeciles can feel happy about it.
So, in not actually reading the report or understanding how they got the results, you’ve missed an important point. Let me illustrate – Firstly, with the statistics as is, there is no single country on earth where men have overall advantage. Now, if they used an equality scale, it would assume there is equality to get to. But when you have a systemic problem of oppression which operates in only one direction, and measure only ‘outcome’ variables and not policy (as explicitly stated) then your variables need to also be one direction. The reason is this: There are many variables… Read more »
Your argument, as I understand it, is that the gender gaps in outcomes identified in the report need to be viewed in a wider context of government policies and other undisclosed factors which disadvantage women, and that when these are taken into account, any gender gap which appears to show that males are being systematically dicriminated against can be seen to be only the misleading result of the limitations of the report? Does it really make sense, in the twenty-first century, to argue that women are still so universally and severely disadvantaged that even a gender gap as large and… Read more »
@Beth Kong: I wonder if these reports are an attempt to turn what is essentially a 3rd world problem into a 1st world problem in order to maintain interest from those with the money.
I am such a cynic now that I always “follow the money” and see where that leads.
Following the money, unfortunately, is something that I think of, too. More often than not, there are certain agendas behind seemingly innocuous things like reports. . .
Thanks for this! That is such a strange, disturbing way for gender equality to be treated. This is one of the most frustrating things for me, as a woman- ridiculously biased, questionable measures are used to ‘advance’ women’s rights, awareness about inequality and oppression, etc. to the point that both men and women stop taking this sort of information seriously. There are certainly enough unbiased facts available that make clear the poor position many women in many regions are in, and yet they’re neglected in favor of opportunities to make it seem as though many women are overreaching or find… Read more »
If what you say is so, then please direct me to a Feminist based site (ex. N.O.W., Jezebel) that advocates for men (other than ‘Tims’) in any area that they are behind equality wise.
I’m honestly not very familiar with either site you’ve mentioned- these are people I know in my life, from classes I took in college, and elsewhere. I will say that I took courses on gender with multiple female professors who spent a great deal of time discussing the ways in which men are overlooked in society, especially in that they’re often inadvertently barred from being nurturers or having options outside of being ‘tough’ breadwinners, and that the concepts of masculinity and femininity need to be revisited in order to provide both sexes with more freedom of expression and personal agency.… Read more »
You claim you’re a Feminist yet you never heard of N.O.W. (the National Organization of Women)? The political driving force of the Feminist movement for over 40 years (give or take)? Interesting.
I didn’t say I hadn’t heard of N.O.W. or Jezebel, but rather that I’m not very familiar with those websites- I don’t visit them regularly, though I have in the past. I’m simply not current with their content, and therefore can’t speak to whether there’s anything on either site about advocacy for men.
Well the short answer is , there isin’t!
@ bobbt
I was willing to take what Beth said at face value. At first I thought it weird that she didn’t recognize N.O.W too., but then I started to think about it and it makes sense. Many people are told that feminism is about equality. I think it might actually be easier to believe if someone doesn’t listen to or follow the mainstream feminist leaders. The report is a lot closer to how feminism is practiced in the mainstream than it is to the practice of feminism in theory.
@ Beth Hi Beth, thanks for the comment. We both feel the same way and BTW I identify as MRA. Don’t take the ant-feminist sentiment too much to heart. Many MRAs started out being or wanting to be feminists. I was one who examined feminism first. I found the mainstream, organized, feminist groups to be less than welcoming and sometimes hostile to men and men’s issues. Hopefully, it’s just a phase in the evolution of feminism. I can point to two issues, the rape of males and shared parenting / father’s rights where I’ve seen movement among some feminists that… Read more »
I definitely agree. We do need each other. I’m well aware of the fact that there are feminists who are not particularly welcoming to men, but there are also women who don’t identify as feminists who believe that men have everything they could ever ask for, should be breadwinners and not nurturers, etc. My initial post was meant simply to show my support, as a woman, and to share that in my experience feminists don’t all believe the same things, just like all men, Christians, Caucasians, Democrats, or any other group can exist without each member sharing identical beliefs. I… Read more »
Another thing that is ‘missed’ is that for the health index , “A dead man is better off than a live woman who is perhaps not 100% healthy”, this is why they use healthy years instead of just years of life, because if they use LIVE years, the gap would be much bigger in favour of women. To give an example. Fred and Martha were married, Fred died at age 70 of a heart attack but for the rest of his life he was fairly health therefore had 70 healthy years. Martha is 80 years old and still alive but… Read more »
Massaged statistics.
Making the data match the message.
I wonder how they calculate the fact that Fred probably had that heart attack because of other undiagnosed health issues (not to mention things like poor diet and possible smoking). Point being if they want to factor “healthy years” I wonder if they account for the fact that men are less likely to go to the doctor and therefore are likely to have fewer healthy years than suspected. Or (at least in the States) do they account for countries that have health programs SPECIFICALLY for women. Sure Martha may have had 15 unhealthy years but I bet she had more… Read more »
Once I saw how they were treating gender gaps, I disregarded the rest of the report and that’s unfortunate because there are probably serious gender gaps that women face. Even in the other three I almost wonder how the gaps are determined. AVFM did an article on the gender earnings gap in the U.S. I think many of their assumptions are flawed like the gender gap between married partners in my mind is ZERO because their money is shared and should be calculated as such. I’ll link to it so you have a quick and dirty view of the other… Read more »
ht tp://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#11111111111
Practically every country has women on par, or having a better life than men. I find that quite interesting….
Also, I don’t think you will receive many comments on this, I think more women visit this site than men.
I’m not sure why you think that women who visit this site wouldn’t be equally annoyed and displeased with the way this data is being handled- my first impression is that you expect the female visitors who read this to be pleased by the gaps in which women come out far ahead of men being ranked better than countries with equality. I’m a little disappointed if that’s your expectation of the female audience for this site, or for women in general. I think you’re underestimating us a little. If, however, you meant something other than the possibility that we’re not… Read more »
I somewhat share Christopher’s sentiments and let me tell you that while I do think its not an accurate assessment of the female audience of this site I do think there is something to be said of its accuracy about women. Maybe I’m just cynical but to me its pretty clear that as it stands equality is no longer “make sure everyone has a fair shake” but rather “make sure girls/women don’t get the short end of the stick”. I’ve heard about this report before and frankly this is the first time outside of the MRM that I’ve seen anyone… Read more »
It is because they are not really measuring gender equity or pursuing a course of equality. They are measuring women ascendancy. The same could be said for any international organization like the UN or even parts of the feminist movement. They are pursuing womens rise, not necessarily gender equality.
The education gap was the first thing I looked at when iben brought it up in another post. I wanted to see how they handled numbers greater than one. I suspected that they would treat them as total equality and I wasn’t disappointed. They treated a reverse gender gap as total equality. I don’t doubt that it was the best scale for their purposes. I just shudder to think of what their purposes are.
I think we must admit that in the developed world, women are in the ascendant, largely by dint of their own efforts. This is not necessarily bad, but how it will work out for men and for women is anybody’s guess. It could be that men will find themselves saddled with their own mystique: “All men are jerks.” Or, it may be that we men will be left free to pursue our own destinies as providers, artists, scientists, artists, or whatever. We also need to ask what will become of the undeveloped world where women are still deeply oppressed. We… Read more »