A look at the global gender gap

From the World Economic Forum this year comes the annual Global Gender Gap Report (read it here) which compares the world's countries in terms of gender parity in economic, political and educational participation, as well as health and empowerment.
The short version is a list of the top 10 countries in the world. Let's look at the very top first:

This is what any Scandinavian like me would expect, and yes we should be proud of it. Not everything here is perfect in terms of gender equality, of course, and much is left to do, but compared to the rest of the world, it might look damn close to perfect.
The global average is 68%, and the Western Europe average is 72.%, while the Middle East (the worst region) averages at 60%.
Let's continue down the list:

This is the point where things get interesting, and people go "What...?". How come an African country ranks higher than France or Germany, and what is Nicaragua doing there, a country that totally bans abortion? Nicaragua does have one of the world's highest shares of women in parliament, and in Rwanda an incredible 61% of its members of parliament are women.
It is worth noting that the index looks at very data points for health and political empowerment. For health, it only looks at birth ratios and life expectancy, and for empowerment, it only looks at political positions of parliamentary level and above. These are the two scores that pull Nicaragua and Rwanda up toward the top of the ranking, whereas their scores for economic parity (rank 69 for Nicaragua and rank 30 for Rwanda) and educational parity (36 for Nicaragua and 109 for Rwanda) or much lower.
Let's look at the next two:

New Zealand is not much of a surprise - it is kind of a like a southern hemisphere Scandinavia, led by a kick-ass female prime minister to boot. But the Philippines, a country that not only totally outlaws abortion, but also forbids divorce? It is however one of the few countries in the world where women are as likely as men to have managerial positions in business, and ranked just slightly below Norway in economic parity.
Finally, the last two of the top 10:

Ireland may be a small surprise, having just recently got of their abortion law (yay!), but Namibia is a perhaps one people would not expect. But Namibia is in fact the country with the fifth highest share of female law makers in their national parliament, and also scores relatively high in each other category.

The indicators chosen does have a huge impact on the rankings produced, and such an index does have its obvious imitations.

However, while economic pay parity is what we are focusing on here in the rich north of Europe, it is worth remember how bad it actually is in some countries:

Women have as much access to financial services as men in just 60% of the countries and to land ownership in just 42% of the countries assessed

 And also when it comes to female participation in politics, this is the exception, not the norm:

 Across the 149 countries assessed, there are just 17 that currently have women as heads of state, while, on average, just 18% of ministers and 24% of parliamentarians globally are women

These are things that this index tells us something about, and it is worth celebrating that there are countries in the world that are not Scandinavian or wannabe-Scandinavia (hello, New Zealand!) that are doing well in these areas.