Let's talk about sex...

By Carl

There's simply no excuse any longer: women are the equal of men. Period. End of discussion. Why in ANY country they should be treated as lesser citizens, nevermind the United States, is beyond my comprehension:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Nordic countries again dominated the World Economic Forum's ranking of gender-equal countries, while New Zealand squeezed into the top five and the United States fell to 31st place.

Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland retained the top four spots in the 2007 Gender Gap Index released by the Swiss-based think tank on Thursday.

The Forum compared four areas: differences between men and women's salaries, access to education, political representation and health including life expectancy.

Nordic countries were "strong performers" in all four areas, although "no country has yet achieved gender equality", it said. All four countries improved their scores for women's economic participation, driven mainly by a decreasing gap between women and men's labor force participation rates and salaries.

Sure, some ass is going to point out that woman are physically inferior in some rigged, arbitrary way (perhaps raw anerobic power), and someone else will point out that women score consistently lower on some arbitrary, rigged scale, say math and science scores in schools.

Bullshit. Men score way lower on other scales than women and if THOSE scales were the ones used to decide opportunity and by inference wealth and power, I'd be wearing a gold lamé thong and serving drinks poolside.

Not that I'm making an endorsement here, but do you want a strong reason to vote for Hillary? Here's one:

The United States, the world's leading economy which had ranked 23rd in 2006, fell back as a result of weaker economic and employment opportunities for women, though female political empowerment improved somewhat over the year, the Forum said.

Don't you agree that this is a horrendous statistic? Not only are women hurt more by our national policies, things are not getting better, but worse!

And yet, our President touts the "strong economy" and spinning the most positive silk out of a pile of feces. Trouble is, the silk still stinks and doesn't look good.

My god, we're 25 places behind the Phillipines, and nine behind Cuba, for Christ's sake!

I'm sure some wise-ass right-wing white male will point out that Switzerland fell into 40th... gee, that's small comfort to the single mom in Kentucky who's struggling to raise two kids while having been let go from the only job she's ever loved, and debating whether to work at Wal-Mart or move.

Is anybody out there? Does anybody care? We risk our entire nation with these offensive and oppressive policies towards people that need our help. In the global economy, with global threats to our nation and her citizens, and with the opening of borders all around the globe, to deny ourselves the resources -- the full abilities, intellect, talents, and efforts as full partners -- of half of our population is not just disgraceful, but idiotic.

(The full rankings are here... it's an Excel file. A PDF version is here.)

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)