WEF: Philippines 8th worldwide in gender equality

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines moved to eighth among the Top 10 countries in terms of gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s 2011 Global Gender Gap Report.

In the Geneva-based WEF’s 6th annual Global Gender Gap Report released recently, the Philippines remains among the Top 10 countries in terms of gender equality.

The Philippines moved a notch up to eighth from the previous year among 135 countries with a score of 76.9 percent.

The Philippines is the only Asian country in the Top 10 list and far from the rankings of Asian economic giants and leading western democratic countries.

In the report, the Philippines also got a perfect score of 1 in educational attainment, health and survival, and women outnumber men enrolled in college.

The annual survey also showed that four more Nordic countries namely Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden lead the world again in promoting equality of men and women. Other countries in the Top 10 are Ireland (5th), New Zealand (6th), Denmark (7th), Lesotho (9th), and Switzerland (10th).

Countries in the bottom 10 include Nepal (126th), Oman (127th), Benin (128th), Morocco (129th), Cote d’Ivoire (130th), Saudi Arabia (131st), Mali (132nd), Pakistan (133rd), Chad (134th) and Yemen (135th).

The ranking involves the measuring of gap between men and women in four key areas: economic participation, which covers the percentage of women and men working in high scale job, educational attainment, which involves women’s access to all level of education, health and survival, which deals with women’s life expectancy and mortality rate and political empowerment, which measures how women are represented in decision making structure such as that in the government.

Countries are scored in the scale of 0 to 1. A score of 0 means complete inequality while a 1 means complete equality.

The total scores were calculated by taking the average of 14 different ratios, each based on a specific indicator that falls under the heading of one of the four key areas: the ratio of male to female literacy; the ratio of male to female pay for similar work; the ratio of male to female legislators and senior officials and the ratio of the number of male to female head of state in the last 50 years among others.  –Pia Lee-Brago (The Philippine Star)