Gender inequality

By San Jose (map), Hayden120 (retouch),
 via Wikimedia Commons

I consider myself privileged to be a woman living in the UK. I had always considered myself one of the lucky ones, that having been born female I had the good fortune to live in a place where that wasn't too much of a problem.

33 better places to live

Today I discovered that actually there are 33 better places for women in the world, including all of our nearest neighbours.*

This is because the UK has been ranked 34th in the Gender Inequality Index, part of an annual development report published by the UN Development Programme.

This assesses countries based on three areas - reproductive health, empowerment (parliamentary representation and educational attainment) and the job market, to find out how equally or inequally women and men are treated in different countries. The report rates 148 countries (data isn't available in all countries of the world).

As you'd expect, developed countries come out at the top of the index, and the poorest come out at the bottom. Australia and Canada come in at spots 17 and 18. The US bombs in at 42.

Holding their heads up high

These are the countries with the most gender equality, according to the Gender Inequality Index:

Silvio Berlusconi, by Ricardo Stuckert/PR
(Agência Brasil), via Wikimedia Commons

1. The Netherlands

2. Sweden
3. and 4. (joint) Denmark and Switzerland
5. Norway

6. and 7. (joint) Finland and Germany

8. Slovenia

9. France

10. Iceland

11. Italy

12. Belgium

I was just going to give you the top ten, but then I noticed that Italy was ahead of the UK, and felt compelled to include this information. It means that the country that elected Bunga Bunga Berlusconi to be its Prime Minister, is ahead of us in terms of gender equality. That is pretty galling. 

Doing the walk of shame

These are the bottom 12 countries - those which ranked as having the least gender equality. There are few surprises - some of these are the worlds poorest countries, whilst others (spots 145 and 148) have notoriously bad human rights records. These are the places you don't want to go to be a woman.

136. Zambia
137. Cameroon
138. Côte d'Ivoire
139. and 140. (joint) Mauritania and Sierra Leone
141. Mali
142. Central African Republic
143. Liberia
144. Democratic Republic of the Congo
145. Saudi Arabia
146. Niger
147. Afghanistan
148. Yemen

What does it all mean?

I idly speculate that the UK does so spectacularly badly because we have relatively low representation of women in parliament, bringing us down in the 'empowerment' ranking, and our job market is still relatively unequal, partly due to the high costs of childcare, something which the countries above us have all pretty well sewn up, allowing women to go forth and be useful and productive members of society.

The fact that we come 34th doesn't mean that the UK is a bad place to live. But it does highlight that, as a relatively rich company, and a nation that considers ourselves to be progressive, we are lagging behind our nearest neighbours when it comes to equality between genders. It's time to try and keep up with the Johanneses.

*Except Ireland, which seems to be strangely absent from the report.

Giving feminism a bad name?

Today I came across this picture, of the Ukranian feminist protest group Femen:

It shows young, attractive women, some of whom are showing a nipple, in slogan T-shirts amid furniture. The women were protesting in Ikea in Paris, because the company has removed pictures of women from its catalogue for Saudi Arabia.

But by getting their nipples out and creating a ruckus in our favourite furniture store, are they giving feminism a bad name?

Rude girls

Undoubtedly many people across the world will have looked at these pictures in their newspapers and on the internet and tutted, dismissed them as feminists, seen these women as young and misguided, exposing themselves, causing trouble where they don't need to. Or else they will be pleased that they chose to wear nipple-exposing garments, as if you don't care or don't know what they're protesting about, at least you get to look at some attractive topless women, so everyone's a winner.

But whether you like it or not, you have noticed. Millions of people have seen these pictures. And it took showing their nipples to make that happen, because if they hadn't shown their nipples, we all know it wouldn't have been big news. They wouldn't have made the newspapers in the way that they have. So, yes, they do have to strip off to get themselves noticed, because it worked. And now you know that Ikea was happy to delete women from its publicity material in some parts of the world.

Nice girls

Femen is the face of radical feminism today. In the UK we take for granted the fact that we no longer have to chain ourselves to railings to get the same rights as men, but in other parts of the world (such as Botswana), this just isn't the case. And these women are standing up and telling the world that that's not OK. It's not acceptable for powerful multi-national companies, like Ikea, to collude in the suppression and censorship of women. These are our modern Emmeline Pankhursts.

Of course, we don't all need to be stripping off for equal rights. We don't all need to be Emmeline Pankhursts or Femens. Sometimes, just having your rights and showing you value them by exercising them from time to time, is enough. We don't have to join the Femen women, but we can, quietly support then, by not condemning then, by not laughing at them for getting their nipples out in Ikea, and by acknowledging that actually they have a very good point to make, and how else were they going to make you sit up and listen?