New index highlights the best – and the worst – countries in which to be a woman with Denmark coming out top of the gender equality charts
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This is a man’s world. Or so the words in the famous James Brown song goes. And according to a new index released this week that’s very much the case in some countries of the world, but in others gender equality is more equal.
The index, entitled Women Peace and Security Index, was produced by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and co-authored by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) ranks 177 countries in terms of women’s inclusion, justice and security.
Before we get bogged down in the details of how the report’s rankings were compiled, let’s cut straight to the chase and give you some results. Coming in as the best country in the world to be a woman is Denmark. Perhaps not surprisingly, the five Scandinavian nations (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland), which always do well on indicators measuring human and economic development, all placed in the top ten countries in which to be a woman. In fact, Europe is generally a good place to be a woman, with all but one (New Zealand) of the top ten spots going to European countries. The UK was rated number 26 on the list, just ahead of Spain (27) but a little below France (24). While the United States was down at 37 on the list.
And the worst countries for female equality? Well, they’re perhaps not much of a surprise either. Afghanistan takes the dubious honour of being the world’s worst place to be born a female, with Yemen and the Central African Republic coming up hard behind.
One of the more interesting findings of the index was that societies where women do better are also more peaceful, prosperous, democratic and better prepared to adapt to climate change. But the index authors sound a note of caution when they note in the foreword to the index that: ‘Multilayered crises undermine the status of women and threaten to roll back decades of progress’.
This, they say, is caused by rising authoritarianism, conflict, mass displacement and the continuing consequences of Covid-19.
The authors of the index used a range of data to come to their conclusions. These indicators fell into three groups: Inclusion, Justice and Security. Each of these three groups could be further broken down and under each of the groups there were a few surprises. Rwanda, for example, is the country with the highest female parliamentary representation (54.7 per cent) while Belarus has the lowest maternal mortality rates (1.1 per 100,000 live births), but Iraq has the highest rates of intimate partner violence (45.3 per cent). The index also found that worldwide more than one in eight women had experienced recent intimate partner violence.
