RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yes, according to this report, American women who want to enjoy greater gender equality should move to Burundi — a small East African country whose president held a sham election to garner an unconstitutional third term and who is currently threatening to commit genocide against his own people in order to keep power. Burundi also has a continuing history of widespread rape committed by both private citizens and government officials.

Or there’s Burundi’s neighbor Rwanda, whose government recently recruited Burundian refugees, apparently to wage an armed insurgency within Burundi.

Also outranking the U.S. are the Philippines (seventh), where human-rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing are normal; Bolivia (22nd), where corruption and gender-based violence prevail; and Nicaragua (twelfth), where property rights are tenuous and the press faces judicial and legal harassment from the Ortega administration.

The report nullifies its own authority with the obviously bogus rankings it has generated. It tells us little about the holistic well-being of women in these countries and more about the limitations of its methods.

The report’s index purports to measure women’s economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. It disregards wealth disparities between countries, focusing solely on the size of the gap in each country between men and women for these indicators.

The report’s basic premise is that gender equality considered by itself is informative enough to be a useful tool of comparison among countries in the areas it measures. This premise, however, is false.

For example, a country where both men and women die young, but die at roughly the same age on average, will rank high on gender equality in the area of survival. Mozambique’s life expectancy is 53 years — 186th out of 194 (according to the World Health Organization) — but the life-expectancy gender gap is nearly closed. Equality of life expectancy is important insofar as, for instance, the average person won’t live many years as a widow or widower. But without accounting for the overall average life expectancy in each country, the report cannot make fair, meaningful comparisons.

Two major flaws follow from the report’s false premise. The first is its means of determining political empowerment. The assumption that more women in political office translates to better policies for women is false. “You can have an authoritarian country that has absolute quotas in everything, but why is that desirable?” asks Kay Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who has written extensively on childhood, family issues, poverty, and cultural change in America. “These social scientists are mistaking equality for freedom.”

In Burundi, for example, electoral law as defined by its constitution established a quota of 30 percent female representation in elected positions, which include the national assembly, the senate, and the municipal councils. But aside from the nation’s well-known problems of violent unrest and pervasive political corruption, Burundian women do not even have equal legal protection for their property rights. Legislation protecting the right of Burundian women to inherit land has languished in the national assembly for eleven years.

Many of the ranked countries implement voluntary political quotas. Some political parties choose to fulfill quotas requiring a certain percentage of female representation in government. Countries can use these quotas to require a certain percentage of women in the potential pool of candidates, or in the candidates who run, or in the candidates who win elections.

The lower U.S. ranking is “mostly due to a decrease in its political empowerment score” because the portion of women with positions in President Obama’s cabinet fell from 32 percent in 2014 to 26 percent in 2015. (Cue ”war on women” complaints from Democrats.) In any case, Hymowitz observes, “having women leaders is not necessarily good for women by their own standards.” The belief that female leadership is automatically good for women demonstrates “the crudest kind of social-science thinking,” she adds. “You pick what you think is a problem, and instead of thinking about it in complex and interesting ways, you simply count.”

The report’s second major flaw is its utter blindness to cultural distinctions. Many leftists idolize the Nordic countries’ generous welfare systems, and they would be thrilled to note that the top four countries for gender equality in the WEF report are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. But Iceland achieves its level of equality by way of a different economic structure and a radically different disposition toward family. And it’s also significant that Iceland, unlike the U.S., is very small — only 320,000 inhabitants — and exceptionally homogenous.

Iceland has one of the world’s highest divorce rates and the highest percentage of working mothers, and 70 percent of all Icelandic children are born out of wedlock. It is common for young single women of 21 or 22 to choose to become pregnant, often while still in college. John Carlin writes in the Guardian, in an article titled “No Wonder Iceland Has the Happiest People on Earth”:

As a grandmother I met on my first visit to Iceland, two years ago, explained it: “The Vikings went abroad and the women ran the show, and they had children with their slaves, and when the Vikings returned, they accepted it, in the spirit of the more, the merrier.”

The state supports nine months of paid paternity and maternity leave to be split between the father and mother however they choose. And yet, Icelandic women still choose to take more time off than men do and are much more likely to work part time. The “wage gap” is a popular progressive complaint, but critics have pointed out that it disappears almost entirely when you take into account the number of hours worked, the field of work, and whether the worker takes time off to raise children. Christina Hoff Summers, analyzing wage statistics in an episode of her Web series the Factual Feminist, concludes, “the gender wage gap uses bogus statistics.”

But for the sake of argument, let’s take at face value the numbers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: It reports that Iceland has a bigger wage gap than the U.S. does — Icelandic women’s wages are 62 percent of Icelandic men’s, compared with 75 percent for American women.

Related: Why the ‘Wage Gap’?

“When you have a freer society, you may not be able to reach the kind of parity that women have in mind, because women in a free society won’t make the same choices as men,” Hymowitz notes. Iceland is a relatively free country, and yet when given the option to split work leave equally with men, Icelandic women still elect to spend more time at home with their chcildren.

Reports such as the WEF’s don’t reflect, for instance, whether women are satisfied with the number of children they have, or with their job and its flexibility. The report’s authors make assumptions about values, but women may not share or consider important the values held in high esteem by the WEF .

And, as Hymowitz says, “All of these studies ignore that men and women are interconnected and that their happiness and well-being are interconnected.” A study that seeks to compare countries in a meaningful way must account for the extent to which the citizens can freely pursue happiness. Otherwise, equality doesn’t amount to much.

— Celina Durgin is a Collegiate Network fellow at National Review.