The best—and worst—places to be a working woman

By The Data Team

TO MARK the United Nations’ International Women’s Day on March 8th, we present our “glass-ceiling index” which aims to reveal where women have the best chances of equal treatment at work. It combines data on higher education, labour-force participation, pay, child-care costs, maternity rights, business-school applications and representation in senior jobs. We've also included paternity rights as an additional measure this year. Studies show that where new fathers take parental leave, mothers tend to return to the labour market, female employment is higher and the earnings gap between men and women is lower. Each country’s score is a weighted average of its performance on ten indicators.

Unsurprisingly, the Nordic countries—Iceland (a newcomer to our index), Norway, Sweden and Finland—come out top overall. In these countries, women are present in the labour force at similar rates to men. Finland has the largest share of women who have gone through higher education compared with men (49% of women have a tertiary degree, and 35% of men). Norway’s gender wage-gap (6.3%) is less than half the OECD average (15.5%).