The ever-readable Naomi Wolf – author of such classic late twentieth-century cultural studies texts as The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities – recently brought the Newsweek/Daily Beast (‘Newsweek‘) 2011 Global Women’s Progress Report to the attention of the readers of her Al Jazeera English column via an opinion piece (The price of oppressing your women, 5th October 2011). This report uses a variety of measurements – financial, educational and so on – to rank 165 countries in terms of where it is best to be a woman; predictably, countries in economically and politically stable northern Europe – such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway – dominate the top ten, providing 70% of the nations in this elite category, while countries which are synonymous with war, disease and extremely limited state capacity – the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan – populate the lower reaches of the chart.
The Newsweek survey is a fine initiative and will continue to provoke much discussion. However, on closer inspection of the report, we at Mediolana believe there are some profound methodological lacunae which bring into question its overall value:
1. Gendercide. As noted in this blog in our piece on this year’s International Women’s Day, China and India – two countries which are the poster-children of the belief in exponential economic growth – are also world leaders in gendercide. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen‘s notable 1990 estimate of 100 million killings of unborn or young girls in a pair of nations deeply scarred by the One-Child Policy and the dowry system respectively is doubly tragic because that astronomical total is now indubitably, and substantially, higher. It is reasonable to posit that any country which engages in such wholesale killing of the female gender purely on gender grounds should be rock bottom of the Newsweek index, yet in a quite surreal twist the magazine instead focuses on fair hiring policies in the PRC; neither India nor China features even in the bottom 20, an act of ‘outsourcing’ that is perhaps without parallel.
2. Work Versus Wealth. The Newsweek survey places great emphasis on work as a key indicator of how liberated women are: legal barriers to entry in certain industries, the percentage of women in the labour force and women’s wages as a percentage of men’s are specifically cited under the ‘Economics’ rubric of the methodology. However, while to some degree this accentuation of work is perfectly understandable and indeed compelling, it does not necessarily signify a great deal. Work is not wealth; in particular, conventional salaried work might not lead to the accumulation of wealth and control of capital that has genuine meaning in a capitalist economy.
In this context, one is reminded of Muhammad Asad Sadi and Basheer Mohammad Al-Ghazali’s 2009 study on female entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia; despite facing all kinds of legal and cultural obstacles to work in a country which is regarded – not least by important Saudi personalities such as Dr. Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi – as an international joke in the context of women’s rights, Saudi women have still managed to accumulate a total of SR 62 billion in bank accounts and other locations, owning an estimated 23,000 businesses as of the mid-2000s. A global study which incorporated women’s ownership and control of productive assets would make for far more enlightening – and perhaps sobering – reading.
3. Mental Health. Incredibly, the Newsweek survey makes no reference to mental health in its methodology, concentrating as it does on vital but ultimately incomplete indicators such as the incidence of HIV, the availability of contraception and the number of unsafe abortions per thousand women.
This is despite the fact that, according to the World Health Organisation (‘WHO’), unipolar depression is expected to be ‘the second leading cause of global disease burden by 2020‘, already occurring with twice the frequency in women vis à vis men, and the reality that mental health problems which are suffered especially by women are now assuming gargantuan proportions, particularly in developed nations: a recent study by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology spanning 30 European countries found that women were 250% more likely to suffer depression than men, while many of the same nations at the acme of the Newsweek index also occupy the top spots in the WHO’s statistics on per capita mortality from eating disorders: both charts are topped by Iceland.
Mediolana 
I think the Newsweek Article raises some important points, but completely dismisses others.
It is shocking that for the two ‘1 billion’ countries, their practices of Gerndercide are not even blinked at in the article, yet the social time bomb is going to be horrendous in both these places. India is going to be an awful place to be a woman in the not-too-distant future, with the dowry system sitting alongside honour killings and acid attacks as standard in many rural areas. This is not to say that all of India or China is bad, as both countries have large and distinctly matriarchal areas where the social norms of country are turned on their heads.
And while there is certainly women who hold great amounts of wealth in Saudi, I think the Newsweek article does miss a huge factor in deciding the economic stature of women. However, one thing is clear, the entry of women into the workplace does make for a richer society as a whole, not just monetarily but also socially.
In the end, the world is still far too patriarchal and in a very bad way. While the western model is not ideal in many respects, it allows the freedom of choice for the individual. A lot of countries on the tail end of the list simply deny that choice to all its citizens, and women (unfortunately) will face the brunt of that system of governance. Without freedom, the ability to change a gender skewered system in many places remains an elusive hope for far too many women worldwide.
I think the studies raise some important points and unfortunately tells some shocking stories through raw stats – the numbers of rapes in DR Congo does not even register in the mind, such is the scale of the crime. Yes, agreed, there are flaws in the reporting, but more importantly, the systems it highlights are what needs fixing. The treatment of half the planet’s population serves as a pointer to Mankind’s brutality.
As you correctly point out, freedom of choice is a non-negotiable; it’s just that entrepreneurship may well be a preferable option for many – not only women – who value flexibility. The idea that work per se is somehow an indicator of anyone’s well-being may have been more true in the period 1945-90, but in an era where most jobs ultimately do not buy anything like what they should given the immense amount of resources a person has to devote to salaried employment, ownership of productive capital – which can be as simple as a sewing machine or computer – could be a far more meaningful indicator.
Re: DR Congo, it’s like a visitation from hell 😦