Good news: the U.S. jumped from 53rd to 30th on the World Economic Forum’s global ranking of gender equality, flanked by Denmark and Holland. The rise was largely the result of progress on the political front, especially President Biden’s appointment of women to his Cabinet. But progress in Congress remains painfully slow. It is time for quotas in order to move the needle here.
Overall, the Forum’s Global Gender Gap report made for less upbeat reading, especially in terms of the prediction that the world will not reach gender equality until the year 2156, a date that has been pushed back by 36 years as a result of a single year of the pandemic. For what it is worth, this is likely an overly pessimistic view. The WEF prediction is based on a simple straight-line extrapolation of the trend over the last fifteen years into the future. But this is a weak prediction method. It is hard to imagine that developments over the last few years provide a good forecast of likely trends in the early 22nd century. So, although the prediction is what grabs the headlines, it should be treated as, at best, a “stylized fact.”
The much greater value of the WEF report is in the painstaking collection and aggregation of details on a whole range of indices of gender equality from around the world, from education and wages to health and politics.
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