Interesting reading of the “World Economic Forum’s 2010 Global Gender Gap” report.
New Zealand maintained its privileged position, ranked 5 out of 134 countries. The UK was ranked 15, USA 19 and Australia 23. New Zealand was ranked 5th behind Iceland who lead the way, then Norway, Finland and Sweden. Interesting that Scandanavia takes out the top placings followed by NZ.
NZ has maintained its 5th ranking over the last 4 years, improving its ranking from 7th in 2006.
In the main areas surveyed –
- Economic Participation and Opportunity – 9th
- Educational Attainment – 1st equal with 22 countries
- Health and Survival – 91
- Political Empowerment – 8
When looking at the Female to Male ratio in Economic Participation and Opportunity, we didn’t fare so well when comparing females to males in work as legislators, senior officials and managers, but high in work such as professional and technical workers.
NZ has a high female to male ratio in enrolment in Tertiary education.
In Health and Survival there were 37 countries ranked 1st equal. We were just under the equality score for female to male sex ratio and just on the equality score for life expectancy.
The interesting part was Political Empowerment because although we were ranked 8th in the world, we scored very low with female to male ratios in parliament, in ministerial positions and low scoring in years of having a female head of state (over the last 50), helped by having had 2 female PM’s as opposed to countries having none. But the gender gap is still very wide in this area, in NZ.
If we look at the ability of women to rise to positions of enterprise leadership in NZ, with 1 being the worst score and 7 the best, NZ scored 5.39
A very interesting report and a reminder that NZ should not be complacent. We ranked well overall, but had areas that definitely need improvement.