United States needs to close its gender gap

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Each year the World Economic Forum publishes a Global Gender Gap report that ranks the countries of the world on four metrics to measure their degree of gender equality or inequality:

1. Economic participation and opportunity.
2. Educational attainment.
3. Health and survival.
4. Political empowerment.

Countries are scored between 0.0 for most unequal and 1.0 for fully equal.

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Iceland tops the list with a score of .8640 and they have been number one since 2009. The Nordic countries consistently dominate the list — this year the top four include Iceland, Finland (.8451), Norway (.8403) and Sweden (.8159). Yemen is at the bottom with a score of .5054.

Where does the U.S. land? We’re ranked 22 with a score of .7373. That’s down from last year’s report when we were ranked 17 with a score of .7412. Surprisingly, there are five non-Western countries ahead of us on the list: South Africa, Cuba (!), Lesotho, Nicaragua and the Philippines. We get the highest scores in educational attainment (ranked #1) and economic participation and opportunity (8). We are lowest in health and survival (ranked 33) and political empowerment (55).

All in all, being a woman in the United States isn’t so bad, but we do have a ways to go to catch up to the Nordics and get closer to that number one spot.

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What do you think about these rankings?

Melanie Holmes is vice president of World of Work Solutions for ManpowerGroup, a Milwaukee-based staffing solutions company.

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