The U.S. has fallen four spots in the World Economic Forum's ranking of countries according to gender equality, landing in 49th of 144 countries. While the U.S. ranks first for closing the education gender gap, women are still far less likely to have positions of political power or to contribute economically, according to this year's report.
Data: World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2017; Chart: Lazaro Gamio / Axios
The global picture: This is the second year in a row that the report has found a regression in economic participation, with only 58% of the gap closed, which was the lowest score since 2008. While political empowerment of women compared to men has slowly been improving over the years, there was no change in the 23% gap from last year.
Other highlights from the report include:
- 82 countries have improved the gender gap and 60 have seen their score decrease.
- Nordic countries hold the top three spots for gender equality.
- At the this rate, the gender gap will be closed in 100 years by 106 countries.
- The US ranked 23rd in 2006.
- The study found that 50% of all work women do is unpaid.
- In the US, women only make up 19% of all graduates in the engineering, manufacturing and construction and information and communication technologies fields.
Note: The Global Gender Gap report measures the discrepancy between men and women's participation, opportunity and care in each country, but does not take into account the country's overall development compared to other countries. A wealthy nation with more opportunity and resources than others can still rank low on this list due to unequally distributing those resources to men and women.