'Study' Lists United States as One of Top 10 Worst Countries for Women
Conservatives have a pocketed response for when we hear disparaging remarks about America: If you don’t like it, you’re more than welcome to leave.
That saying has taken some heat in recent weeks, but the implication is simple. We know that actions speak louder than words, and no one actually leaves because they know deep down that America truly is great.
They won’t tell you that, though. In fact, many will say exactly the opposite, as evidenced by a pathetic excuse for a study conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and resurfaced by Big Think. They had the audacity to rank the United States as the 10th worst country in the world for women.
The study was a survey of 548 so-called “experts on women’s issues,” which tells you all you need to know. Not a shred of scientific polling or statistical analysis is present in this screed, just the opinions of certified leftists.
The survey asked the participants to rank the bottom five countries in the world based on the danger women face in six areas: healthcare, economic resources, culture or tradition, sexual violence, non-sexual violence, and human trafficking.
The high-profile #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns vaulted the US into third place in the “sexual violence” category. That was enough to land it in the top ten.
Just for fun, let’s be a little more diligent than the Thomson Reuters Foundation and actually dig into the issue. Is the United States really the third worst country for sexual violence against women, and tenth worst overall?
The best available statistics place the United States at 14th with a rape rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents, which is less than half of leftist utopia Sweden. It is important to note than only countries with reported rapes are included, which means only 18 out of 54 African countries are present.
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea are also conspicuously absent from the rape statistics. Furthermore, the latter two countries did not even crack Thomson Reuters’ top ten.
Let’s go beyond just sexual violence, and examine the overall claim: Is the United States the tenth worst place for women in the world? When economic and social factors are considered, the claim is even more dubious. Here are a few facts from a World Bank Group report titled “Women, Business and the Law 2018.”
37 countries still require male permission for a woman to apply for a passport, 32 of which are not in Thomson Reuters’ top ten. 31 do not allow a woman to independently choose where to live, and 27 of those are apparently better than the United States.
America is also worse than 28 of the 31 countries that restrict a woman’s ability to become head of her household, and three countries outside the ridiculous top ten restrict a woman’s ability to open a bank account.
All in all, these are just a small portion of the legal, economic and travel restrictions on women around the world. What about issues beyond the law, like standard of living?
According to the Economist, the United States has the 11th highest GDP per capita, which is quite impressive considering how large and diverse the country is as a whole. The United States has a population almost fifteen times greater than the rest of the top ten combined.
What about life expectancy? The CIA puts us at 43rd, but only three years behind the seventh spot. Female life expectancy in the US is over 81 years, placing us far ahead of many countries that didn’t make the Thomson Reuters list.
What does all this mean? It means that real gender-based discrimination exists today, and too often it gets trivialized by people with a warped perspective of the world.
The United States is a great country for everyone. Male, female, black, white — it doesn’t matter. Everyone has equal rights under the law and everyone has the opportunity to participate in the greatest economic engine ever conceived.
These out-of-touch Western feminists are more than welcome to leave if they truly disagree, but I suspect it will be a while before they start storming the border into North Korea.
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