One-Way Ticket to Iceland for Me and My Daughter, Please

I was on one of those self-imposed Internet wild goose chases, where I start off looking for something specific but end up side-tracked over and over again until I have a dozen windows open on my desktop and I can’t remember what I was looking for in the first place. 

I was closing them all down when I came upon one of those mysterious, sneaky windows - I didn’t recognize it from my surfing yet there it was, left behind in the wake. 

Mysterious Window

Another optimistic moment for parents of daughters everywhere. 

This led me to wonder, what would be an accurate, reliable source of information about the status of women in a country? I eventually ended up at the United Nations and their Gender-related Development Index, which compares female standard of living to male standard of living using an equation that takes life expectancy, education, and income into account. The Gender-related Development Index (or GDI) is one of five factors used by the UN to arrive at the Human Development Report which ranks countries by their assessed standard of living. 

Some of the countries listed on the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2007/2008):

Iceland (1)

Canada (4)

Japan (8)

France (10)

US (12)

Spain (13)

United Kingdom (16)

Cuba (51)

Mexico (52)

India (128)

Sierra Leone (156) (This is the last country on the list)

Follow this link to see the full list: GDI

You can actually view each country separately for more information. Think, wow - Canada is number 4 so things must be pretty good there? Well if you look at the stats for Canada’s GDI  you will see that while women actually enjoy a longer life expectancy than men and get more education, the average income for a woman is $25,448 while the average man brings home $40,000.

That’s not even close to equal and Canada is in 4th place.

Too bad this kind of information doesn’t pop up randomly on desktops instead of advertisements for ‘hobby training’ for women… 

Just recently I was at a dinner party and I heard a 21 year old American woman say “I’m glad Hilary Clinton didn’t make it, I just wouldn’t feel comfortable having a woman run my country.” Ouch.

This is just my interpretation of this resource and the banner I included above - I would be interested in hearing anyone else’s perspective. (You can read my guidelines for comments here.)