Can You Guess the 10 Best Countries For Women? Hint: the U.S. Isn’t One of Them

The World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Reportfor 2013 measuring gender disparity between men and women around the world…and disappointingly the United States didn’t even make it in the top 20!

The report, which ranks 136 countries, determines its findings across four primary areas including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival, ranking the United States 23 ^rd on the list for 2013, HuffPost reported.
Each country out of the 136 is assigned a score between 1 representing total gender equality and 0 depicting inequality, the total score representing the percentage of the gap that has been closed between women and men. This year, the United States received a score of 0.7392, which is actually worse than the score it received the year before when it was ranked 22 ^nd.
According to the report, despite having a near-perfect gender gap in terms of education, we have a serious gender disparity when it comes to politics, with women constituting only 18.3 per cent of the 113 ^th Congress.
So which countries ranked above the United States? Not surprisingly, Scandinavia (known for their kick-ass policies on promoting gender equality) scored extremely high yet again with the top 10 as follows:

1. Iceland
2. Finland
3. Norway
4. Sweden
5. Philippines
6. Ireland
7. New Zealand
8. Denmark
9. Switzerland
10. Nicaragua

Jodie Gummow is a senior fellow and staff writer at AlterNet.

Source: Alternet