The patina of wishfulness

From Gaining Momentum by the ILO - Bureau for Employers' Activities. I offer this chart with some hesitancy as I do not know the definitions being used or the quality of the data. That said, the list of countries with the highest percentage of women in managerial workforce is quite interesting and broadly consistent with other data I have seen.

Of the OECD countries, the country so often lambasted as a female unfriendly, patriarchal knuckle-dragger, the US, comes out ahead of all the other OECD countries. By a lot.

Click to enlarge.

The nearest OECD country to the US is New Zealand with women forming 40% of all managers in the workforce compared to 42.7% for the US. In other words, the US female managerial representation rate is 7% (42.7-40.0/40.0) higher than its closest OECD rival. How does the US do compared to those Scandinavian paragons of female friendly social policies designed to enable women to achieve more? Sweden - 35.5%, Norway - 32.2%, Finland - 29.7%, and Denmark - 28.4%. The US female managerial representation rate is 36% higher than the average for the Scandinavian countries.

Nothing like hard numbers to strip the patina of wishfulness off the facts of reality.