Since 2014 I have written a ‘World Cup of Gender Equality’ blog each time (here and here) the men’s football tournament has come around. In it, I rank countries competing according to their position with regards to women’s rights. So, I have regularly charted how the competitors in the men’s football World Cup fare on issues such as the gender pay gap, proportion of women in parliament and the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap index. Now that the Lionesses have reached the Final of the Women’s World Cup, what can I say?
Well, I can note, as Marina Hyde has already done so eloquently, that the bigwigs at FIFA have hardly covered themselves in glory, by suggesting to the women’s teams that they should just push at the open doors a little harder, in order to reach greater equality with men within the game. It’s salutary to see that England’s opponents in today’s match, Spain, have reached the final while in dispute with footballing authorities over team conditions. It’s hard to imagine male footballers competing in such circumstances, or, for that matter, being told to make a bigger effort to make their case.
There have been rumblings of discontent over the Prime Minister and Prince of Wales’ absence from Sydney. While it is kind of touching to see future King William’s green credentials come to the fore (he is reportedly concerned about the environmental impact of flying long haul for short trips) it seems unlikely that similar worries would have prevented him from attending a male World Cup Final in his capacity as President of the FA. Meanwhile, frequent flyer, Rishi Sunak, has no such excuse. He even had a script in front of him to wish the Lionesses well – how many trees died for that? It seems more than plausible that he may have ventured out if men were in line to lift a trophy this weekend. However, let’s face it, the likelihood of the men’s tournament taking place in Australia, with so much revenue at stake over global broadcasting deals, is pretty low. Who would suggest timing a World cup final for men when English pubs aren’t fully open?
So, my take on the women’s World cup is that it’s all pretty predictable – everyone has been so used to identifying football with men, that there’s an implicit bias in the importance granted to what is happening today. Women fought for the right to play football officially and were granted it embarrassingly recently. England’s men have not managed to reach a World Cup final in my lifetime – and I’m not young – but now that women have done so, the excitement is tempered by something of a lack of recognition.
In the spirit of my previous blogs on World Cups of Gender Equality, I can tell you for today’s match, that Spain is faring much better on provision of paternity leave and the proportion of women in parliament, than England. But, at the end of the day, the Lionesses tick the football boxes. We might be just about to find out what a ‘game of two halves’ really means.
In each of 2014 and 2018, I posted my ‘World Cup of Gender Equality’, charting how the countries competing in the men’s football World Cup fared on a few indicators concerning women’s position in society. This year, I wondered if I should do it again. There were plenty of footballing reasons why Qatar was a questionable choice for the World Cup – lack of existing football culture, the heat, the need to move proceedings to winter – but it is wider issues that have provoked increasing concern. The controversy over the plight of migrant workers who built the tournament infrastructure, and that of LGBT people who face persecution, has prompted some to suggest that the event should be boycotted. There has been growing attention to issues around inequality between women and men, as the matches grow nearer, along with the arrival of fans – many of them women – in Qatar.
Qatar’s record on workers’ and wider human rights is bad. With the football about to begin, there’s an opportunity to scrutinise the country and hold it to account further in future. Gaby Logan has said in a piece for BBC Sport, that if there is to be any possible positive legacy on human rights issues from the World Cup in Qatar, ‘we need to have collaborative conversations about these topics while the tournament is going on; while the world is watching’. Gary Lineker has described the BBC’s opening programme as like a ‘mini Panorama’, covering the political background to the tournament. It’s impossible to discuss this year’s World Cup without a long introduction.
In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper found activists working on labour rights issues who suggested that the World Cup may have indirectly helped in gaining progress on migrant labour issues, by raising the stakes for the host country. Action to address workers’ rights became harder for Qatar to avoid. Reforms in conditions and wages also gained more publicity once they were made. However, migrant workers still do not have the right to unionise and there has been limited implementation of the reforms laid out on paper. There has been little or no discernible movement on the issue of LGBT rights.
Writer Salma El-Wardany interviewed a range of Qatari professional women about their lives for the BBC World Service. They spoke highly of the opportunities available to them. Some argued that their situation was actually better than for women in the West, because of the high standard of living, and the fact that they could employ staff to deal with domestic chores. The working conditions of migrant domestic staff have also been under scrutiny.
However, when questioned about the practice of guardianship, many interviewees preferred not to say much. Guardianship is the custom whereby women need to obtain permission from a male relative, in order to do things like enrol in education, obtain a driving licence, travel abroad, or get married. For women with open-minded families there may be little practical issue; but if male relatives are more traditional, they hold a power to prevent women from taking up options in education, work or relationships.
The Qatari government has put anti-discrimination measures in the constitution, and is committed to increasing women’s labour force participation. But these commitments come up against the contradictory potential restrictions of guardianship. These contradictions are perhaps given added weight by figures showing that two-thirds of Qatari graduates are women, but women have twice the rate of unemployment as men. Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising that Qatar ranks lowly on the measures I have used to rank World Cup countries on gender equality.
Since 2014, I have looked at the proportion of women in parliament, the level of the gender pay gap, and a summary measure of women’s relative position within countries, provided by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Gender Gap Report. Of course, each time the World Cup happens, there is a different set of qualifying teams, so it is not possible to compare exactly the same countries over time.
In 2018, 20 of the countries had also appeared in the previous tournament, and there were two newcomers. This year, only the host, Qatar, is new to the competition. Twenty-four teams played last time, and Wales boasts the longest gap ever between qualifications – they last appeared in the finals in 1958. For both England and Wales, I use figures for the UK, as that is how the data is collected.
The overall trend seems encouraging for women in parliament internationally – in 2014, no qualifying countries had parliaments with over 40% female politicians, while in 2018, there were four. Today, in 2022, there are seven countries. In 2018, the top spots among World Cup participants were held by Iceland and Sweden, neither of whom qualified this year. If you considered Wales’ Senedd separately, then there would be 8 countries this year, as 43% of its members are women. Thirty-four per cent of Westminster MPs are women, as shown here:
Mexico has the highest proportion of female members of parliament among 2022’s World Cup countries, at 48%, followed by Costa Rica (46%) and Spain on 44%. At the other end of the table, Japan and Qatar have parliaments which are 90% male, while only 6% of parliamentarians in Iran – currently experiencing major protests over women’s rights – are women. The low figure in Iran has stayed constant since 2018. I gather, via BBC Newsnight, that Iranian activists may protest during Iran’s fixtures, because of the treatment of protesters in their country. Politics and football seem inextricably linked in this World Cup.
My second indicator of gender equality is the gender pay gap. Information on this has never been equally available globally. This year, the second dataset I have used previously to supplement OECD data, had no additional country information, so, my somewhat depleted chart looks like this:
As in previous tournaments, Costa Rica, Belgium, and Denmark all enjoy low gender pay gaps. In 2018, Argentina had a gap of around 25% according to WageIndicator data, but now, according to OECD figures, its gap is among the smallest. Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea remain the countries with the largest gap between women’s and men’s pay. For middle-table, high-income countries, the situation has remained fairly stable. As the pandemic was found to impact women’s working lives more than men’s, it’s encouraging to see that these gaps have not grown dramatically, but progress towards equality is slow.
Lastly, in the WEF data, countries are ranked according to gaps between men and women in health, education, economic opportunity, and political empowerment. Because they look at gaps between men and women in individual countries, and not at levels of performance, middle- and low-income countries can rank highly. The highest ranking country in this year’s World Cup is Germany, and historic strong performers Belgium, Costa Rica and Switzerland maintain their relative success. Host, Qatar, and Iran are at the bottom of the table. These low rankings indicate that all is far from well when it comes to gender equality. Iran has ranked lowest amongst tournament countries since 2014, suggesting that little has changed for women’s prospects there in recent times.
If we look at changes in position on the WEF index since 2018, Iran has actually dropped 3 places. As educational and health gender gaps have tended to converge, the index may be more sensitive to changes in terms of economic and political empowerment. Mexico’s large climb up the table since 2018, seems largely explained by an increase in women’s representation in parliament, while Denmark’s fall seems to be down to a growing gender gap in economic opportunity. Poland has experienced declines across all four dimensions of gender equality measured. That so many countries have seen a reduction in gender equality is concerning, reminding us that progress is not linear:
The decision to hold the men’s World Cup in Qatar has meant that politics and human rights have dominated the lead-up to the competition. Perhaps, then, the World Cup of Gender Equality is more relevant than ever. Qatar remains very far from winning a World Cup of Gender Equality, and has little prospect of winning the football World Cup.
As for who the likely victors are, in football, Brazil, Argentina and France are hotly tipped; in the World Cup of Gender Equality, Costa Rica, Belgium and Spain fare best, with Argentina and Spain closest to taking both World Cups.
As I write, Qatar has made a U-turn on beer being available in stadiums outside of corporate entertainment areas. On the eve of the World Cup, the gap between host country and fan culture may just have got a little larger.
The men’s football World Cup is about to kick off for the 21st time in Russia. Back in 2014, when Brazil hosted the tournament, I thought it would be fun to compare how women fared in the competing countries, while everyone was engrossed in the male game. I collated a few indicators and wrote a blog. It seems only natural to return, and see how we are doing in 2018.
Of course, each time there’s a World Cup, the participating countries change. So it’s impossible to compare all of the same countries over time. This year’s teams are quite an interesting spread, with 20/32 having taken part last time, and two first-timers: Iceland and Panama. The competition will feature the highest number of Nordic countries ever (3 – Denmark, Iceland and Sweden) alongside the highest number of Arabic-speaking countries (4 – Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia).
First among my gender equality indicators is the proportion of women in parliament, a reflection of women’s political participation, and easy to find data for all countries:
In 2014, none of the countries in the top 3 on this measure had parliaments with more than 40% female members, but in 2018 this is true of 4 countries. Iceland and Sweden are famous for their high rates of female representation, with 48% and 44% of members of parliament, respectively, being female; Senegal (42%) and Mexico (43%) are probably less well-known for progressiveness in this regard. Back here, I have to use UK figures for England, and the figures have gone up quite a bit, with 32% of MPs women, compared to just 22% in 2014. At the lower end of the table, Iran has doubled its proportion of women in parliament since 2014, from 3% to 6%. Nigeria is one of a small number of countries to have reversed the trend, with the proportion of women falling from 7% to 6%. In 2014, Costa Rica headed the World Cup countries’ table with 39% of its parliamentarians female, compared to 35% today.
Next I’ve looked at gender pay gap data, a much more high profile issue in terms of equality, now, than it was back in 2014. It’s considerably harder to get comparable data across the globe for this, but once again I’ve used a combination of OECD and Wage Indicator data to maximise coverage across World Cup countries. The Wage Indicator data comes from surveys, rather than population data, but covers a wider range of countries:
In 2018, South Korea is just about tied for the highest gender pay gap with Brazil – albeit measured on different scales. Whereas South Korea’s gender pay gap is virtually static on OECD measures since 2014, Brazil’s gap on Wage Indicator data has widened considerably. Costa Rica has the lowest gender pay gap standing at 1.8% – unfortunately there was no information for this country in 2014. However, Belgium, which had the lowest gender pay gap of World Cup countries then, has reduced its gap further, from 6% to 4.7% this year. The UK, Germany and France are still reasonably close together in the middle of the table, but France has seen a bigger reduction in the gender pay gap since 2014, dropping to under 10% while the UK and Germany remain nearer to 15% on the OECD scale. Of the Nordic countries, Denmark has the lowest gender pay gap, while data is much more patchily available for countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Finally, I turned to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Gender Gap Index, for an overall indication of women’s relative position in World Cup countries. For many years, Nordic countries have topped this Index, which looks at gaps between men and women in health, education, economics and politics. Iceland, a World cup newcomer, is number one on the Gender Gap Index showing the greatest equality between men and women in 2017. In the 2014 World Cup, Switzerland was the highest-ranking participating country, charting at number 9, in the Gender Gap Index for 2013. The Swiss have now dropped to 21st place, Here’s how the World Cup countries rank overall:
And here’s how the position of the 20 countries who appeared both in World Cup 2014, and again this year, have changed:
That so many countries have fallen down the WEF Index over four years, is a reminder that gender equality is rarely achieved in a linear fashion: countries can go through periods of both progress and decline, with women’s position fluctuating over time. The tough economic situation of the last few years has probably impacted on women’s position in many nations. And it should also be borne in mind that countries tend to ‘bunch’ on health measures, like gender gaps in life expectancy, and, at the top of the index, in matters of educational equality between men and women. So changes in ranking can be particularly influenced by changes in political representation – the Russian World Cup hosts have declined in position since 2014, and rank relatively low in terms of political equality between men and women. France has recently seen increases in both its proportion of women in parliament and at the top of government, and this is important in its relatively big shift up the Index; by contrast Brazil’s political empowerment rating has dropped recently, accounting for its lower position in 2018. Among countries playing in the World Cup this year, but not 2014, Peru and Senegal have been making progress on the Gender Gap Index.
So who would win a World Cup of Gender Equality? Iceland tops two of my tables so has to be up there, and Costa Rica has the lowest gender pay gap. Neither of these countries is hotly tipped for the football finals. Simon Kuper reminded us in the FT Weekend that the World Cup’s relationship to other trends can be overhyped: ‘It often reflects sociological reality but doesn’t shape it’, he concluded. I read elsewhere that Gary Lineker once said ‘Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end the Germans always win’. If the look Angela Merkel gave Trump the other day is anything to go on, could it be that women’s empowerment and men’s footballing prowess are set to converge?? Perhaps it’s of some comfort in England that many argue that football World Cups are essentially unpredictable …
In the face of World Cup fever, I was idly wondering how the countries involved compared on issues other than football. Then I was inspired by the WSJ’s ‘World Cup of Everything Else’ – which is a must-visit amusement for lovers of data visualisation. Here the World Cup countries are ranked on everything from population and threatened mammal species, to Body Mass Index and numbers of McDonalds per head of population. Also in there is a figure for women’s representation in parliament. I’d been thinking about how women in the World Cup countries fare whilst we’re all fixated on the male game, and so have put together some figures from global data sources to see who wins where women are concerned.
I looked for information on the proportion of women in parliament in the competing countries (relatively easy to find for all countries at the World Bank) and measures of the gender pay gap worldwide (more complicated to measure in the first place and much poorer global coverage). In political representation, the Netherlands, Ecuador and Costa Rica are out in front with 39% of members of parliament female, whilst Iran has fewest women in parliament: only 3% of representatives there are female. For England I’ve had to use UK figures throughout, and with 22% of MPs female, we’re strictly middle of the table.
Meanwhile, on the gender pay gap, many other gaps emerge. There’s no information on this for many of the countries in Latin America and Africa, nor for Iran or Croatia or Bosnia Herzegovina, on the most accessible measures. The OECD compares differences in median earnings for full-time working men and women (in blue in graph below) whilst the Wage Indicator data (in red) comes from surveys, rather than population samples, and compares hourly rates of pay by gender. On the OECD measure, Belgium is our winner with a gender pay gap of 6%, whilst South Korea and Japan are bottom, chalking up gender pay gaps of 37% and 27% respectively. Using the Wage indicator figures, which cover more Latin American countries, we can see that Ecuador and Argentina and Chile all have gender pay gaps of over 30% – but in Chile’s case OECD information on full-time workers comes in at a lower level of 16% difference between men and women’s earnings. Again, England occupies the centre ground, close to the results for USA and France – and narrowly beaten by Germany on the OECD measure.
I was casting around for other measures of the state of gender relations, and found that the World Economic Forum (WEF) produces the global Gender Gap Index, which summarises the relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economics and politics. So who would win the World Cup on gender equality? According to the WEF index, the answer is – Switzerland, which comes in at number 9 in their world rankings. (The very top of the WEF table contains the Nordic countries of Europe, alongside New Zealand, the Phillipines and Ireland – none of whom qualified for the World Cup this time). Algeria, Iran, and Ivory Coast all rank low on this index, coming in at 124th, 130th and 131st respectively. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and England all feature in the Top Twenty, whilst the host country, Brazil ranks 62 in the world – just ahead of two other previous champions, Mexico and Italy.
So what have I learned from a look at the World Cup of gender equality? Depending how you look at it, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Belgium are winners. And for much of the world, politics, economics, health and education can still be a game of two – gendered – halves.
wonklifebalance 