News from Womenable

The Global Gender Gap: Where in the world is the economic, educational, health and political status of women at closest parity with that of men? In Scandinavia. A new ranking of the global gender gap finds four Nordic countries - Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland - topping the list, a ranking unchanged from last year.

While this year's analysis of the relative status of women and men does not show any major changes, the list has been expanded to include 128 countries (up from 115 last year). The largest positional changes among the top 20 include gains by Lithuania (up to 14th on the list from 21 last year), Latvia (from 19 to 13), and New Zealand (up to 5th place from 7th last year), and demotions for Canada (down 4 positions to 18th), and Germany, the United Kingdom, Sri Lanka, Australia and South Africa - all of whom slipped 2 points from 2006.

To learn more about the Global Gender Gap, and to download the full report, the rankings, a press release and to view video clips of the study's authors talking about the report, visit the World Economics Forum's Global Gender Gap web page.
'Doing Business' Initiative to Become 'Engendered': Long-time womenabler Amanda Ellis has recently moved over from the International Finance Corporation's Gender Entrepreneurship Markets initiative to head up a new initiative at the World Bank - engendering the highly-popular "Doing Business" project. Read more here. Three cheers for Amanda!
The State of Women's Entrepreneurship in the UK: Prowess, the UK-based organisation which PROmotes Women's Enterprise Support, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary with an event in the Houses of Parliament, at which time they released a new analysis of the State of Women's Enterprise in the UK. What does this analysis show? That:
- while the rate at which women are entering into self-employment is rising at a faster pace than men, women are still less likely than men to be starting their own businesses,
- there are some significant regional differences, which point to the need for localised support, and
- much remains unknown about entrepreneurship rates and challenges in the BAME (black, asian and minority ethnic) communities.
Prowess executive director Erika Watson also recently sounded off on the topic of support for women's enterprise in the UK in an op-ed article in the Financial Times.
A More Complete Picture of Women's Enterprise in the US: The National Women's Business Council, analyzing special tabulations from the US Census Bureau, has enhanced the accounting of the contributions of women to the US economy by adding a new slice to the pie: women-led firms. Women-led firms - businesses that are run on a daily basis by a woman or women who own a plurality, but less than a majority, of a business - number just over 1 million, and add 2.5 million jobs and $300 billion in revenues to the 6.5 million majority women-owned firms already counted by the Census Bureau. In total, then - adding in majority women-owned firms - there are 7.5 million women-owned or women-led (WOWL) businesses in the United States (as of 2002), employing 9.6 million workers and generating $1.2 trillion in revenues.

To learn more about these new numbers, visit the NWBC web site. And for commentary on what these numbers mean, click on the link on the left or visit womenable.com.
Women on Corporate Boards - Three's the Charm: US-based, corporate-focused research organization Catalyst has released a report finding that Fortune 500 companies with greater diversity in their boardrooms enjoy a healthier bottom line. Check out a summary of "The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women's Representation on Boards" on the Catalyst web site. A critical mass seems to be reached with three or more women directors.