Estonia is making achingly-slow progress toward gender equality, and the country still has a long way to go. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2009, Estonian women are about 71 percent as empowered as Estonian men. This ratio has been creeping upward, albeit at a snail’s pace, over the past four years. But other countries are improving more quickly, so Estonia’s standing in the world, which fell in 2007 and 2008, remained stuck at 37th place in 2009.
The annual study examines gender equality in four areas, and Estonia distinguishes itself in none of them. The four areas (along with Estonia’s global rank in each): economic participation and opportunity (36); educational attainment (37); health and survival (41); and political empowerment (50).
The report exposes some glaring areas of inequality. Unlike its near neighbors Finland (#2 overall in the world), Latvia (#14), and Lithuania (#30), Estonia has never had a woman as head of state. And Estonia’s index of wage equality for similar work was cringe-inducing; Estonian women earn only 60 percent as much as their male counterparts who do similar work.
Estonia was the 18th-ranked country in Europe, but it did place far ahead of such gender-inequality powerhouses as Luxembourg (#63 in the world), Italy, (#72), and Greece (#86). And the study revealed that Estonian women are 63 percent more likely than men to enroll in post-secondary education. Can this perhaps be viewed as a favorable leading indicator of future equality?
