Women's Rights VS Women's Happiness

With the celebration of the 99th International Women’s Day last month, people were brought along to consider women’s issues. Is there a relationship between women’s rights and their happiness?

Firstly, the definition of “women’s rights” is essential. It refers to “freedoms and entitlements of women and girls of all ages” such as the right to vote, to work, to get equal pay as men, to own property, to get education, to have martial, parental and religious rights. Specific indexes, such as “Gender Equality” and “Women’s Suffrage”, can be reflections of the general term.

Different people have different ideas about "women's happiness". However, based on the Gender-Related Development Index , measures of well-being include life expectancy, education, purchasing power and standard of living, research shows that the best countries to be a women are:

While the Ten Worst Countries for Women are Afghanistan,Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Sudan, Guatemala, Mali, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Somali.

This is a reflection of the happiest and least happy women in the world.

Among the top 10, Sweden is said to be a country in which women truly thrive. A 2005 report by the World Economic Forum found this Scandinavian nation to be the world's "most advanced country" for women, with greater levels of equality, power, health, and well-being among women than anywhere else.

This result is correspondent to Gender Equality ranking and Adults at High Literacy Level, in which Sweden is on top of the list.
In an overview of higher education in Sweden, it is said that the rapid increase in female students is one of the most striking phenomena in all higher education systems, which implies that more Swedish females have the right to obtain higher education, compared to other countries.

These are good examples showing that Sweden is definitely one of those countries in which women have the most rights. As mentioned above, the Gender-Related Development Index measured based on life expectancy, education, purchasing power and standard of living – the possible components of happiness for women – shows that Sweden is the 6th best country in this category.

In the case of Swedish women, seems like they do feel happier if they have more rights. Then do women feel unhappy when fewer rights?

According to a survey, the people least satisfied with their lives are those in eastern and southern Africa, where one-in-five have a negative view of the future. Nine out ten worst countries are Islamic countries, which means Islamic women are the unhappiest. They are treated as second-class citizens at best. For example, in Afghanistan, men can marry up to four wives and can easily divorce their wives without court proceedings simply by repeating "I divorce you" in the presence of two male witnesses.

To conclude the information above, there does exist a relationship between women’s rights and their happiness. Women in countries which provide them with more rights tend to be much happier than the women who have very few rights in other countries.

However, sometime as women have different definition about happiness, they may have different standards of expectation. Maybe other examples can be found that in some less developed countries, women still feel happy even though they have fewer rights than those who are in developed countries.

More Internet = More Democracy?

Since 1989 when Tim Burners Lee first invented the World Wide Web, the Internet has contributed enormously to communication development. Diverse forums, video sharing websites, blogs, etc. enable people to get their voices heard by a large number of others. It raises the question that is there a relationship between unrestricted use and available access of the Internet in a particular country and its level of democracy?

According to the “Democracy Index” complied by The Economist, based on the answers of the 60 survey questions, countries are classified into four groups:
1. Full Democracies (scores of 8 -10)
2. Flawed Democracies (scores of 6 - 7.9)
3. Hybrid Regimes (scores of 4 - 5.9)
4. Authoritarian Regimes (scores below 4)

“Internet access” can be defined as the percentage of internet users among the whole population.

The relationship will be evident if we compare the two major sources mentioned above. First, let’s take a look at the first 10 countries on the list of Democracy Index of 2008:
Now let's take a look at their percentages of Internet usage:I found it quite interesting that the top four countries on the list, i.e. Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Netherlands, are the same ones as those top four on Democracy Index, with a little difference in ranking. The similarity suggests that the relationship between larger Internet access and higher level of democracy can be true.I checked these countries from Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions. It is not surprising that they have similar structures. In fact, these countries can be categorized into Scandinavian countries which have common Scandinavian cultural dimensions: relatively low power distance, extremely high individualism, extremely low masculinity and medium uncertainty avoidance.

When we take a look at the other end of the Democracy Index, they are mainly African countries, Middle East countries and some Asian countries. Checking the figures of their Internet coverage, most of these countries have really low Internet usage. In other words, the penetrations are mostly under 2%.

Democracy Index survey for 2008

Internet Penetration (% Population)

The two graphs listed above show similarities in those countries which have low democracy index and those which have very low internet coverage.

Therefore, it is not difficult to see that, the higher the Internet usage is, the higher the democracy level is. Or the lower the Internet usage is, the lower the democracy level is.

Still, there are some special cases. For instance, Saudi Arabia (Democracy Index: 1.90, Authoritarian regime), the 7th least democratic country, has an Internet coverage of 26.8%, much higher than that of South Africa (9.4%). However, the South Africa (Democracy Index: 7.91) is actually categorized as a Flawed Democracy country. In spite of special cases like this, the relationship still generally exists.