[W]ith such a wealth of data and intellectual prowess at their disposal, how did the authors [including Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard] arrive at the conclusion that the United States ranks 23rd in terms of closing the gender gap, whereas Nicaragua is 10th, Cuba 15th, and Burundi just edges us out, coming in 22nd? I [Weekly Standard writer David Adesnik] contacted both Tyson and Hausmann to inquire about the study’s counterintuitive results. Both of them referred me to Saadia Zahidi, a senior director at the Forum as well as coauthor of the gender gap report. Zahidi committed to providing additional information, although none has yet arrived. Thus, I had to figure out for myself why advanced statistical analysis might indicate that the women of Cuba, Nicaragua and Burundi face less discrimination than those in the United States....
November 27, 2013
"According to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, three of the best options for women seeking greater equality are..."
"... Cuba, Nicaragua, and Burundi."
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44 comments:
It's called "leftwing bullshit" for a reason.
Did you know that when Western liberals insist that every country and culture in the world be graded on the social, political, and economic equality of women they don't call it colonization or bigotry?
It's true!!
I have not read the report and give it 5 stars.
Because if one man is a billionaire & the professional women in his orbit make $250K a year, there's more inequality than if everyone in a 3rd world country, male & female, subsists on $10 a week.
Which is why (1) "inequality" is a bullshit economic metric (2) it's so beloved by the modern left.
Where does the United States rate on Thigh Gap Equality?
The study is just another propaganda hit piece to be used to condemn the USA and praise 3rd World Communist shitholes as "more Progressive".
From Wiki:
It “assesses countries on how well they are dividing their resources and opportunities among their male and female populations, regardless of the overall levels of these resources and opportunities,” the Report says.
Ignoring the evil for a moment, this type of data mining is stunningly, impressively creative.
Back to reality, the economic data support what we already knew- when it comes to inequality there are only two choices: 1. Some people are poor. 2. Everyone is poor.
Based on the methodology described, a country with no child labor laws would be ranked very highly on "child economic opportunity" based on child participation in the work force.
It makes sense if you consider that life for men in those countries is so awful that life for the women isn't that much worse by comparison.
My old 1987 Mercury was very nearly equal to my friend's 1988 Festiva. (Assume for the sake of this example that all vehicles have been well maintained) A 1998 Lexus is far less equal to a 2003 Bentley. Yet only an idiot would argue that the 1987 Mercury is therefore a better car than the 1998 Lexus.
'Just as likely to be assassinated as male council members' is a plus in gender equality terms.
...how did the authors [including Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard]
Aren't you glad that the US only sends its best & brightest to argue our case before these august international bodies? God only knows what might come out of these meetings if we sent Larry the Cable Guy, or somethin'.
Using their numbers:
Using their numbers:
The situation in Sweden is 10% better than the US.
The situation in the US is 4% better than France.
The situation in the US is 4% better than Uganda.
The situation in the France is 0% better than Uganda.
The situation in the US is 26% better than Saudi Arabia.
Interesting curve.
Women's intuition.
Young Hegelian is quickly becoming one of my favorite posters. Sez what I think, but actually cites facts and stuff (which is not fair for internet debating by the way).
Progressives to dictators: Tell us how you want us to develop an index so we rank you higher than the United States.
Life is so easy as a progreslave.
Kinda sounds like the CBO scoring the ACA a few years back! Garbage in, Garbabe Out!
Which country does the Gender Gap rank #1 in the Life Expectancy indicator (p59)? Russia! In a report about gaps in equality it might seem strange that the country ranked at the top of the chart for equality has the largest gap between female/male life expectancy (65/55) on the entire list.
Poor Australia is ranked at 81st even though female life expectancy is 3 years higher than male life expectancy. The reason is that they define life expectancy equality as 1.06:1.
It is phony egalitarianism.
@Carnifex,
Thanks for the big shout-out, carni!
I try my best, as do we all here. Well, most of us. Most of the time.
Dividing zero into the sum of two positive numbers is an easy task that requires little social sophistication and achieves perfect equality.
If women score higher than men in a subcategory then the score is capped at a maximum score of "1" (equality) even if the ratio is actually, say 1.64:1. So, in the category of Educational Attainment for Fiji (p198 pdf link) there are 4 subcategories where women are equal or doing better than men in 3 of them but since they trail in one subcategory the overall rank is that women suffer inequality.
On page 4 they acknowledge that they could present both gaps in the achievements of women and also the gaps in men's achievements but "We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes."
Mind the Gap.
Look, it's easier to have equality when everything sucks equally!
So the next World economic forum will be in Havana?
I never miss an opportunity to remind people that Laura D’Andrea Tyson famously claimed, when she was economic advisor to Bill Clinton, that "A dollar in tax cuts is a dollar taken out of the economy."
What does this close the gap even mean? All you should expect to get is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
And women have done phenomenally in this country. We have women running billion dollar companies.
They are doing fine. Only in a leftist world where people expect equal outcomes can they keep peddling this canard.
It can't happen logically, unless you totally reorder society to where advancement is based on quotas along racial and/or sexual lines,, and not on individual achievement.
There is no glass ceiling in reality. But I see why the feminists keep wanting to push their victimization.
The other indicator in the Health category, aside from Life Expectancy, is the sex ratio at birth which I'm not sure why is a significant category.
The Gender Gap report redefines head of state to exclude Queen Elizabeth II being head of state of British Commonwealth countries and they also think Helen Clark of New Zealand was a dude.
It would be a fun exercise (for someone with time on their hands) to take the data and fix it into a credible set of numbers, or demonstrate, at any rate, how easily numbers can be manipulated. Wish I had more time on my hands. . .
Let's fund one-way opportunity scholarships to each of these workers' paradises.
Would love to transport the "researchers" from the Magic Mountain to the fetid shores of the lake fronting Managua or to the shithole Burundi or the shithole Cuba there to make their ways along the smooth paths laid out for them. Remarkable bit of "work." Do you believe them or do you believe your own eyes
It looks like we have a credibility gap here folks.
It looks like we have a credibility gap here folks.
Michael Totten has a good piece on Cuba in World Affairs, which they would be well advised to read. I sent the link to my daughter, who is a leftie but sensible, as she visited Cuba ten years ago hoping to find an example of Socialism that works. She speaks Spanish and quickly saw the truth. She agrees with Totten.
She said that she saw the "Panoptican" he writes of.
"An oblivious tourist could be blissfully unaware of all this and have a nice time in Cuba, I guess, but I was not an oblivious tourist and knew perfectly well that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara turned the entire island nation into Benthem’s Panopticon."
Find me 100 women that are willing to renounce their American citizenship and move to one of those places.
Yes, well I'm sure. When I was in college in the early 80's I was assured by a professor that the Soviet Union was in the midst of surpassing the U.S economically and it would be a matter of time before we all understood that. Why do eggheads keep getting this wrong?
Perhaps things have changed for the better in Burundi since I was there, but I doubt it. It is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is filled with the transgenerational hatred like that which Dylan seems to support. The result has been two genocides, one against Hutus and one against Tutsis within the last 50 years.
My memory is that women used to hoe the small gardens the Africans used for subsistence. Form a Western feminist perspective perhaps that is equality. Although I didn't see the event, I understand that when it comes time to give birth the woman simply squats down and out comes the baby. Once the baby is strong enough, the mother will carry it on her back in a cloth sling as she hoes the garden, carries fire wood, cooks food and carries the water for the family. If the baby wets, the woman gets a refreshing bath. If the husband beats her, who will intervene in a country in which she is constantly in danger of death from members of the other tribe?
So how could leftist/Marxist women possibly claim that that life is good for women? Either they are rich papered women who have never seen how the rest of the world lives or they are so immersed in their own ideology that they can not see the obvious.
Cuba?! Burundi?!?! GTF outta here! The places they listed were armpits where it's apparently equally miserable no matter what sex you are. Thank you, leftist international twits. I needed a good laugh today and you provide it.
There is something called the "Human Development Index" used by academics as an adjunct to other metrics of human progress (like GDP/capita).
The reason why the HDI was needed was because GDP/capita sometimes measures the wrong thing, as far as academics are concerned. Arab oil exporting nations may have a very high GDP/capita, but are still not 'developed' the way the academics would like them to be.
If the HDI remained in academia it wouldn't be so bad, but it is being used increasingly by NGO's -- like the DAVOS people -- to set policy and measure the effectiveness of policy.
Economists, as a rule, don't like the HDI because it's an arbitrary measure of value.
What does this close the gap even mean?
It's a phony gap. It's the grievance industry continued. It's stimulus for idiots. $1 spent on a phony metric with shoddy methadology leads to hundreds of dollars in press and pr spent to sell it.
It enters the public domain as a talking point. If it's really good, it rises to the "Women earn 70 cents for every 100 a Man makes" levels.
You can tell this is the case because of the boatloads of american women you find crossing the gulf to Cuba every day. Life is better there for women! The World Economic Forum said so! Everyone buckle up for the anti-immigration rhetoric from Havana.
What of the argument that men are superfluous? The women who observed this trend are living in first-world nations, including America. Perhaps the concept of equality is biased.
These types of surveys say far more about the analysts preparing them than they do about the actual situations being examined.
I remember a similar sort of survey that tried to argue that Cuba and North Korea were the "happiest" countries on Earth. It turned out that it was comparing CO2 emissions, and apparently was trying to argue that low per-capita CO2 emissions correlated with happiness somehow. But oddly their list strongly correlated with both extreme poverty and extreme government repression, neither of which is thought to produce a happy population...
Maybe we shouldn't be discussing this on Thanksgiving. Unless, of course, the DNC listed it on their talking points memo.
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