MasterCard Worldwide Index of Women's Advancement - Building Gender Balanced Business

The annual MasterIndex of Women’s Advancement compares the socio-economic level of women to men against four key indicators: participation in the labour force, tertiary education, managerial positions and above median income.

We compared the performance of the 14 countries listed in the Asia Pacific region against the four indices.

The results for each category are variable. However, there are some patterns worthy of note.

• In half of the countries listed, women were more advanced than men in the category of tertiary education enrolment. This is not surprising as women are the majority of talent in most countries around the world. Inequality favoured men, though, most particularly in Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and India.

• Korea, Japan and India were poor performers with advancement greatly favouring men in all four indices when compared to other nations, coming in the bottom half in all cases. India was at the bottom of three of them and came third from the bottom in labour force participation.

• New Zealand and Australia come out well, usually in the top four or five in terms of advancement for women. However, New Zealand comes a relatively poor seventh in the index that measured the level of above median income women earned in comparison to men.

• Singapore topped the list for above median income and managerial positions.

• There were, perhaps, a few surprises. Vietnam was number one for the participation of women in the workforce (almost equal to men), followed by New Zealand at number two and Thailand at number three. China came second in terms of managerial positions. The Philippines didn’t do as well as one might have expected, given its reputation as something of a matriarchy. It came ninth in labour force participation and seventh for managerial positions.

The full comparative tables for 2009 are listed below.

How they measure up

A score of less than 100 = gender inequality in favour of males
A score of 100 = equality
A score of more than 100 = gender inequality in favour of females