NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, June 17, 2019

By Malaka Gharib

It’s a brand new ranking.

Called the Sustainable Development Goals Gender Index, it gives 129 countries a score for progress on achieving gender equality by 2030.

Here’s the quick summary: Things are “good” in much of Europe and North America.

And “very poor” in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, that’s the way it looks in many international rankings, which tackle everything from the worst places to be a child to the most corrupt countries to world happiness.

And there are a lot of rankings. Alexander Cooley, a professor of political science at Barnard College and the author of Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance, used to keep track but stopped counting.

“It’s so hard to keep up. I’ve just sort of given up,” he says. In 2015, he counted 95 different indexes, with over two-thirds launched after 2001.

Photo courtesy of Martin Fisch.