Where's The Best Place To Be A Woman? How The UK Ranks

Where's the best place to be a woman? Well, it's not here. The United Kingdom is the 26th best country in the world to be a woman, according to research which ranks nations in terms of the status of women.

Denmark tops the Nordic countries, which lead this year’s Women, Peace and Security Index, with a score more than three times higher than Afghanistan, the lowest ranked of the 177 countries. All but one of the top 10 spots went to European countries, and all five Nordic countries chart in the top seven, with Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and Iceland scoring highly.

The global listing, published by Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) and the Centre on Gender, Peace and Security at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), tracks key indicators of women’s inclusion, justice and security to give measures of women’s status worldwide.

Protester of the ResistGag movement stage a protest at the Senate square in Helsinki Finland on July 16 2018 to support...

And the data shows that societies where women are doing well are also more peaceful, democratic, prosperous and better prepared to adapt to climate change. These things were more strongly correlated with women’s status than with GDP, clearly demonstrating, researchers said, how “women’s status matters for everyone in society”.

But researchers added that their study comes at a time when “compounding and multi-layered crises undermine the status of women and threaten to roll back decades of progress”, citing the climate emergency, rise of authoritarian forces, large-scale forced displacement, armed conflicts and the impact of COVID-19.

Almost every conflict involves exceptionally high levels of violence against girls and women.

By Lucy Fulford

The WPS Index, now in its fourth edition, is the only research of its kind bringing together indicators of women’s inclusion, justice, and security. It pulls together the latest data from the likes of the UN, the World Bank and the Gallup World Poll across 13 different indicators of women’s status. Within inclusion, these include education, employment and parliamentary representation through to mobile phone usage, while justice takes in access to justice and maternal mortality. Security areas range from intimate partner violence to political violence targeting women and proximity to conflict.

The UK came 26 this year, with a similar score to Croatia, France and Spain. It’s dropped down from ninth position in 2021/22 and seventh in 2019/20. The UK now ranks just above Poland, which cracked down on women’s reproductive rights, introducing a near-total ban on abortion in 2020, and below the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.

Three English-language countries came in higher for women’s rights than the UK, with New Zealand 10th, Australia 11th and Ireland 13th. However, the United States, in the wake of the overturning of Roe V. Wade, ranked 37, close to Slovenia, Bulgaria and Taiwan. Each country’s score is made up of a number of varied metrics, which show the inconsistencies when it comes to women’s wellbeing and policies. Vietnam, for example, comes 24th when it comes to women’s security, but 154th for justice for women.

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Women’s employment is strong in the UK, at over 75%, and not far off Sweden’s best at 80%. Women’s share of Parliament seats, a measure of female political participation, has risen since 2017, but at 31.5% the UK still falls far below New Zealand’s 50%. UN figures show that 4% of British women have experienced intimate partner violence in the past year, compared with 2% in Switzerland and 8% in Finland, although this naturally overlooks unreported cases.

At the other end of the list, 11 of the dozen bottom countries are classified as Fragile States – countries where on average one in five has experienced recent intimate partner violence, six women in 10 live in proximity to conflict and maternal deaths are over double the global average. Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s takeover has systematically excluded women and girls from public life, is the worst country to be a woman. Yemen, one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises due to a bitter civil war which began in 2014, is second last, and Central African Republic, also grappling with years of civil war, third.

Afghan women chant slogans and hold placard during a women's rights protest in Kabul on October 21 2021. The Taliban...

Armed conflict is on the rise globally, with all of the lowest ranked 20 countries, including Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, the DRC and Haiti, experiencing such violence between 2021 and 2022. Last year, which saw major conflicts with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and civil war in Ethiopia, was the “deadliest in terms of battle-related deaths from armed conflict since 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocide,” according to the report. In 2022, around 600m women, or 15 per cent of women in the world, lived within 50km of armed conflict – more than double the levels of the 1990s.