Vol. 11, No. 1,  January 30, 2007

Women are attending college and entering the business world in high numbers, but if they still pine for equality they should head for the Philippines, Sri Lanka, or Colombia rather than the United States. That is the upshot of the new Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum.

In this report, the USA comes in 22nd and trails the Philippines (6), Spain (11), Sri Lanka (13), Croatia (16), Moldova (17), South Africa (18), Lithuania (20), and even embattled Colombia (21).

Of the 115 countries covered, those trailing the USA include Israel (35), El Salvador (39), France (70), and Italy (77). Michelle Bachelet may be the first female president of Chile, but the nation she leads comes in at 78, ahead of Japan at 79.  The bottom five, respectively, from 112-115, include Pakistan, Chad, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Now let's take the leaders from the top.             

Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Germany round out the top five, with Denmark placing eighth--a kind of Nordic sweep reminiscent of the winter Olympics. The report relied on various indicators for education, health, and economic opportunity. The standards also have a lot to do with how many women are in politics, more specifically the ratio of men to women in parliament. Here the Scandinavians shine, and quotas play a part. Uzbekistan has quotas too. Perhaps that is why, at number 36 in the Global Gender Gap Report that nation trounced Hungary (55), Greece (69), and edged out Namibia (38).

The winners are all big-government, heavily command and control economies, and that is no accident. One of the prime movers of this report is Dr. Laura D. Tyson, dean of the London Business School and chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors under Bill Clinton. She struck some as a rather odd choice for that post.

Dr. Tyson is a Smith graduate who earned a doctorate in economics at MIT and later taught at UC Berkeley.  There, like other smart people, she fell for the gap between Eastern Bloc statistics and reality. She praised policies in Romania that she acknowledged reflected a Stalinist development strategy. That emerged in her Economic Adjustment in Eastern Europe, published by the Rand Corporation in 1984.

Tyson's doctoral dissertation, The Yugoslav Economic System in the 1970s, published in 1980 by the University of California Press, criticizes the Tito regime for its tilt toward the market. The market, she wrote, "failed to live up to expectations."

Readers should not be blamed if they regard the Global Gender Gap Report as a commercial for gender quotas and central planning. Laura Tyson is right that failure to tap the economic energy of half the population is unwise but wrong that quotas and central planning are the key. When it comes to women's equality, the market has exceeded expectations.

"On the ground, however, the forces of the market economy are doing more than any movement or manifesto to propel women into positions of power -- and working women are one of the most important engines of the great burst of economic growth in the postwar era."

Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times calls this development "capitalist feminism" — the "powerful alliance between market forces and the talents, ambitions, and desires of that 50 percent of the population that is finally free from many of the legal and social constraints that held it back for repressive millennia."

Readers might want to revisit the October 10 Contrarian, "Three Cheers for Capitalist Feminism". The true gap lies between devotees of the market and central planning as the best vehicle to advance women's equality.

In case nobody has noticed, in the United States, women run major corporations and think tanks, a woman has been Secretary of State for some time, Nancy Pelosi will be the new Speaker, and Hillary Clinton is poised for a run at the White House. The World Economic Forum may want to quantify the number of women who, given the choice, would opt for Colombia, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines over the United States. The traffic seems very much the other way.

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.