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%).

Women have 44% of seats on listed-company boards in Iceland; strong representation in Scandinavian boardrooms is common thanks to quotas. Norway and Iceland also have voluntary political-party quotas, as does Sweden where 44% of parliamentary seats are occupied by women, one of the highest rates in the world. Hungary ranks fifth, having the lowest gender wage gap, of 3.8%. Despite having few women on boards (11%) and in parliament (10%), Hungary has generous paid leave for mothers (71 weeks at 100% of recent pay) and low child-care costs.

At the bottom of the ranking are Japan, Turkey and South Korea, where men are more likely than women to have degrees, to be in the workplace and to hold senior positions. Their pay gap is also wide. In Japan and South Korea the favourable parental-leave system is mainly a response to their ageing populations and shrinking labour forces; but in other respects they are far behind the Nordic countries, whose commitment to sexual equality goes back a long way.

Correction: The previous version of this interactive chart had the wrong median value for child-care costs in Italy and Turkey. This was corrected on May 9th.

READ MORE: Still a man's world.