Check out the World Economic Forum's new Global Gender Gap Report.

Using categories like "Economic Participation and Opportunity," "Educational attainment," "Political Empowerment," and "Health and Survival"--pretty basic shit, right?--the United States ranks thirty-first. Countries that outrank us include not just Sweden and Norway (duh), but the Phillipines, Moldova, Cuba, Belarus, Columbia, Bulgaria, Lesotha, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Estonia.

We're *fourteenth* in Economic Participation and Opportunity, Seventy-sixth in Educational Attainment, *thirty-sixth* in Health and Survival, and sixty-fucking-ninth in Political Empowerment.

Wonder how much that last one affects the others. Hmmmmm.

And I quote:

Indeed,

Why are we so far behind, oh, say, Lesotha? Because

Let's translate that. Yeah, the U.S. is a rich country. We've got a lot of resources. We do not divide those resources equitably between women and men. (Nor between whites and people of color, the rich and the poor, those who inherent money and those who earn it, etc.)

Not only aren't we fucking keeping up, we've actually dropped in the rankings. As Broadsheet points out,

If you get complacent--hey, women have jobs! Sexism must be over!--you fall behind, Mr. Hare.

Broadsheet takes the opportunity to be skeptical about Hillary Clinton, damn their hides. And while yes, obviously electing Clinton, if it happens, isn't magically going to make women in this country equal, arguing that one woman won't change everything--with the unstated implication that hey, why vote for her then?--is part of the complacency I'm talking about.

No, having a few women "make it" doesn't necessarily change the overall system. And having women at the top doesn't mean that those same women will advocate for such changes--after all, women, just like men, are likely to value the systems that worked for them. And no, not voting for Clinton doesn't mean you're not a feminist, and it doesn't mean that you're not working for equality in other, perhaps better ways. (But not putting women's issues front and center in who you *do* choose to vote for does.)

You gotta have a thick shell and a stubbornly slow but steady approach to keep bashing away at this stuff. But sooner or later, the tortoise is gonna win.

Bitch_PhD suggests that we just have all married men change jobs with their wives, all single men change jobs with their girlfriends, all male politicians step down, and all boys wear their hair long while all girls get signed up for sports. Let's try that for ten years, and see what happens.