I am really surprised that the Philippines made number six, a country with huge child prostitution and human trafficking problems.
The funny thing is only a few days ago when that stupid letter by Henry Makow was posted, I googled him and came across this:
“In the Philippines, Henry Makow, 48, discovered a tropical paradise where women are still traditional and the husband is the head of the household. A Long Way to Go for a Date is Makow's candid and ironic account of his courtship and marriage to a young Filipina (shown on cover.) The book recounts his quest for love and masculine identity at a time when both are under siege in America.� I guess he never figured out he is going to one of the countries with smallest gender instead of “ a tropical island where woman are adoring and submissive�.

In the Philippines, Henry Makow, 48, discovered a tropical paradise where women are still traditional and the husband is the head of the household. A Long Way to Go for a Date is Makow's candid and ironic account of his courtship and marriage to a young Filipina (shown on cover.)

omg

Ireland is #10 even though its abortion law would do most Republicans in the US proud. The study doesn't measure child trafficking or reproductive rights, but gender equality.

Sigh. If only it were surprising that the US is so low on the equality totem pole. I can imagine a number of initiatives that would help create real equality in the U.S., including: paid parental leave, state-funded child care, equal pay, and an end to drug laws that punish low-level offenders who are often women. The countries that rank the highest in terms of equality provide a great deal of support for families in which both parents work, and most of the top ten countries have socialized health care. Anyone else see a pattern?

“The study doesn't measure child trafficking or reproductive rights, but gender equality.�

Yeah, but it only makes sense to me that a country with little economic and educational gap between genders, women don’t get trafficked and where women are “politically empowered� abortion is safe and legal. I find it surprising that that's not the case.

Oh, please even 22 is too good for us. How about 67th in Women in Parliament?
http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm And it may be worse now that we lost a woman in the Supreme Court. Our congress is holding a shameful 16% women.

Bean, there are four indicators used in the study: health, education, economic equality, and political representation. On the first two, all developed countries and a good chunk of developing countries are at almost 100% equality, at least as far as the specific statistics used in the study are concerned. On the third, the US ranks third in the world, behind Tanzania and Moldova. The fourth is where the US screws up; it's also the one with the most variability close to the top, so it dominates the ranking there.

In other words, the US would be much closer to #1 if it adopted changes to its electoral system that would increase the number of women in Congress. Sweden got its high level of representation - 47% - by having a proportional system whose major parties have quotas. Finland, which has no quotas, has 38%, which is still way better than the US (its system allows you to choose which candidate inside a party you vote for, so it can't really have quotas).

Mind you, I don't really trust the study's data sources. International comparisons tend to have somewhat wacky data; this one says the US has a smaller wage gap than Sweden. National statistics show that among full-time year-round workers the US has a gap of 23% to Sweden's 15%.

Makow is a total freak. i'm sort of fascinated. Did you know that all porn is gay? Betty Friedan was a Commie? Lester Pearson was an Illuminati tool? and that there are sinister plots against us all coming from feminists, homosexuals, Zionists, the Illuminati, Satanists, and possibly aliens, and no doubt a few other groups as well? And that he is, contrary to popular belief, "100% sane"?