International Women’s Day? What’s that? Gender Gap in Sri Lanka and the Hillary Factor in the US
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Hillary Clinton-March 12, 2016, 8:50 pm
by Rajan Philips
This article is four days late. The International Women’s Day on March 8 has come and gone. But gender issues are not going anywhere. They are to the fore everywhere as they should be. The question on the title is the same question that Cat’s Eye raised in her media piece 19 years ago, to mark the Women’s Day on March 8, 1997. Cat’s Eye also wrote a piece on the "Hillary Factor" in 1996, after the second presidential victory of Hillary Clinton’s husband in the US. The "Hillary Factor" is again a factor in the US presidential primaries this year, the second time in eight years. The middle part of the title is about the female-male gap in Sri Lanka on a number of select indices based on a comparative evaluation of gender gaps in 145 countries, including Sri Lanka, by the World Economic Forum. Sri Lanka is ranked 84th overall, and has the second highest rank among the South Asian countries, after Bangladesh ranked 64th. India, Nepal, Maldives, and Bhutan cluster at 108, 110, 113, and 118, while Pakistan virtually brings up the rear of the sample at 144, ahead of the last-placed Yemen. What is striking is that Sri Lanka was ranked 13 out of 115 in 2006, and has been sliding down over the last decade, more rapidly after 2011.
The ranking is based on four main criteria, namely, Economic Participation and Opportunity; Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. Each criterion has several indicators and sub-criteria against which sample countries are measured. The comparisons across these indicators present quite a global distribution. The top ranked country, the best place for a woman, is Iceland, which is also the safest country for child birth, and the country with the highest proportion of female board members in businesses. Nordic and smaller European countries fare well on a number of indicators: Estonia is the country with the longest paid parental leave; Slovenia is where men do the most housework; Finland has the highest percentage (63%) of female cabinet ministers; Portugal the highest proportion (18%) of female inventors; and Estonia the highest proportion of female mathematicians (67% of PhDs in Math). In Asia and Down Under, New Zealand has the smallest (5.2%) wage difference; South Korea has the highest (37%) wage gap but a whopping 72% of university graduates in the 25-32 (millennials) age group are women. Little Singapore is the safest country in the world for a woman to walk alone at night, while giant China has the largest number (49 out of 73; the US is second with 15) of self-made female billionaires. The Philippines, ranked seventh, is the highest ranked Asian country.
