The Best And Worst Places to be a Woman

I didn't get my video up yesterday sorry about that I had some kind of bad personal news life stuff going on so luckily this evening I'm feeling much better er, mainly thanks to discovering this gem! [music begins playing - 8 bit cover of This Charming Man by The Smiths] [dances happily while music plays] I defy you to listen to that and not just feel overjoyed. so you probably noticed more news stories cropping up this week about the fact that it's International Women's Day and one that I noticed in particular was "Revealed: The Best and Worst Places to Be a Woman" they've categorised, there are... twenty different categories. Spoilers: the UK doesn't top any of them. Go UK! Yaaaaaay. So proud. The best place to be a woman is apparently Iceland. Iceland has the greatest equality between men and women taking into account politics, education and employment and health indicators. The UK comes in at 16th place down one since 2010 the worst is Yemen and the most dangerous is Afghanistan. The best place to be a politician is Rwanda. Rwanda is the only nation in which females make up the majority of parliamentarians women hold 45 out of 80 seats A female MP in Rwanda said, "I felt I was given a special mission the voice of the women who were the most victimised by the genocide. This is where laws are made and the women here are highly educated. We can raise issues affecting women in parliament and are listened to as much or even more than the men Best place to be Head of State is Sri Lanka Women have run Sri Lanka for 23 years the UK comes in at 7th place while dozens of countries including Spain and Sweden have never had a female Head of Government Best place to be a mother is apparently Norway it says that Norway is the best place to be a mother with low rates of maternal mortality of only 1 in 7,600 it also lists the best place to give birth as Greece Greece is the world's safest place to give birth with a 1 in 31,800 risk of dying in childbirth so I'm not really sure what that difference is between Norway being the best place to be a mother but Greece being the best place to give birth they don't really qualify what that means and the worst is Afghanistan where a woman is at least 200 times more likely to die during childbirth than from bombs or bullets and the world's newest country South Sudan there's a quote, "we see so many women die unnecessarily during pregnancy, 16 mothers everyday. If women are not dying from pregnancy in the UK why should they in South Sudan?" Best place to be a "top dog" by which they mean a senior executive, which is Thailand. Thailand has the greatest percentage of women in senior management, 45% the UK did not rank in the top 20 countries with only 23% of senior management made up of women. Best place for labour force participation is Burundi, which is apparently the only country where the female labour force participation rate, is at 92%, is higher than that of men 88%. Now that obviously just means labour in terms of paid labour and doesn't necessarily reflect what your job is it just means that more women are going out to work in recognised jobs rather than in upaid work by which we mean caring for elderly, caring for children, cooking, cleaning, maintaining the house, maintaining the finances. Which brings us next on to the best place to be a "lady of leisure". Women in Denmark apparently have more time for leisure because they only spend 57 more minutes each day on unpaid work than men. I'm presuming if Denmark is winning that particular spot with 57 more minutes each day on unpaid work than men that means there isn't a single country in the world where men are doing more unpaid work than women going back to actual paid work, Luxembourg shares the top spot with Norway for estimated earned income When income is capped at 40,000 dollars, women and men are as likely to earn the same amount US dollars sorry, that was really, really Westernised of me I should distinguish that. And it says when income is capped at 40,000 US dollars, what about when you're earning more than 40,000 US dollars? I'm not sure, that seems a bit of a... a bit of an odd statistic to me. Sweden is apparently the best place to be a woman in the Arts. The Swedish Film Institute mandates that film grants be distributed evenly between men and women and there are quotas for women in film production in the UK only 6% of film directors and 12% of screenwriters are women. Which, er, explains a lot about women's representation in UK, er, media, ahem, Doctor Who Another one of my favourites for being, being proud of the UK the best place to be a journalist, which is the Caribbean The Caribbean is the region with the highest proportion of TV print and radio news stories reported by women, 45% in the UK about 9% of national newspaper editors are women. Again, we're not controlling the media which is why our stories aren't being told. This being a set of statistics in a newspaper we have to take it with a fairly hefty pinch of salt there's no link to the source to actually look at the data and how they've actually found things like the, how they've defined certain criteria but I thought that was a really interesting article. Obviously I'm just reading about this from the UK so if you are from any of the countries I've mentioned or any countries not mentioned and you would like to do a video speaking about your experience as a woman in that country then please by all means do get in touch you can either leave a response video underneath this video and we'll add it to the playlist for this week, but you can also at any time send in a guest video and we'll put it up on the weekend. Erm, Happy International Women's Day for this Thursday byeeeee [waves and make heart shape with hands]