Tuesday 8 March 2016

Women


                                                                    M.Said: “I Vote so I Am”       




In 2011 I blogged on the status of women for International Women's Day. I thought I would revisit it five years on to see what has changed.
This time round this is much easier because I blog on the statistics gathered the year before. 2010 was the first year when the Human Development Index included a Gender Inequality Index and it has been updated for every year since.
The measure of gender inequality is shown as a number where 1 would be complete equality and 0 complete inequality. It is based on a number of criteria including comparisons of female/male participation in the workforce, per capita incomes, years of schooling, percentage seats in parliament held by women, etc. The UK benefits from having had a female prime minister for 9 of the last 50 years but this seems a bit unfair because whatever her assigned gender Maggie Thatcher was NOT a sister. 
In 2010 Morocco had an index of 0.5767, in 2015 it was 0.590. This appears to be an improvement but in fact it is a retrograde from the high spot of 2014 when it reached 0.5958. I haven't been able to work out why it is going backwards. Nevertheless the apparent improvement may not be very real at all because whilst in 2010 Morocco was ranked 127th in the world in 2015 it is ranked 139th. In the same period its nearest comparators Tunisia and Algeria have similarly fallen behind from 107th to 127th and 114th to 128th respectively. Meanwhile Saudi has overtaken Morocco moving from 129th with a score of 0.5713 to 134th with a score of 0.605, and this in a country where women aren't even allowed to drive!
The UK remains at 18 with a score of 0.78 and the USA has fallen from 19th to 28th with a score of 0.740. Iceland remains top with a score of 0.881.
However Morocco has made progress with maternal mortality during this period halving it from 240 to 120 per 1000 live births so there is some good news although in Algeria it is 72 and Tunisia 46 so there is some way to go still. (The UK incidence is 8, and, shamefully, the USA with the largest economy in the world is 28).

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