Kaitlyn Tribe, a Carleton University Student in Ottawa, interned at FAFIA for her fourth year Human Rights Practicum course.

While here, Kaitlyn produced a summary report on Canada’s global standing based on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.

Overview of Report

Today, women constitute nearly 70 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion people living in poverty, 65 percent of the world’s refugees and two thirds of the world’s illiterate population. Women also make up two thirds of the exploited informal workplace, own just 1 percent of the world’s resources, and earn one tenth of the world’s income.

Contemporary development discourse appreciates the importance of gender equality as essential to alleviating poverty in all countries of the world. In 2006, Oxfam International and Oxfam Canada adopted women’s rights as their thematic focus, recognizing women’s rights as pivotal in determining the health and welfare of nations. UNICEF recently cited gender equality as central to realizing the agenda of the Millennium Declaration and its Development Goals. The current prevailing theme is that gender equality empowers women and their communities and countries because poverty can only be overcome through the full participation of all members of society.

The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979. Although the convention has received 184 ratifications, accessions and successions, gender inequality persists. Gender-based inequality does not only exist in the developing world. It is a phenomenon that transcends nearly all of the world’s cultures, religions and nations, including Canada.

In May 2006, the World Economic Forum released The Global Gender Gap Report, offering a Gender Gap Index. The index includes over 115 countries and their economies, including all current and candidate European Union countries, 20 from Latin America and Caribbean, over 20 from sub-Saharan Africa, North America, and 10 from the Arab World. Together, the 115 countries represent over 90 percent of the world’s population. The study and index use available data from international organizations and the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey to assess the level of equality between women and men.

The unique and noteworthy strength of the Gender Gap Index is not the wealth and diversity of its data, but rather its focus on measuring gaps rather than levels. The report measures gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities rather than levels of available resources and opportunities. Rich countries have stronger economies and higher levels of education, and measuring levels alone will simply illustrate this fact. Instead, the index penalizes or rewards countries based on the size of the gap between women and men in income, for example, but not for the overall levels of income in the country.

The use of gaps over levels makes the Global Gender Gap Report particularly useful in assessing the current status of Canada’s gender equality relative to other countries in the world. The report reveals that Canada is insufficient in areas such as political empowerment and education, and lagging behind many countries that are often perceived as less progressive towards implementing women’s rights.

To download the full report, please click here:
Canada’s Global Standing.pdf [1]
Canada’s Global Standing.doc [2]