'Glass ceiling' index from Economist concludes New Zealand tops for working women

• IF YOU are a working woman, you would do well to move to New Zealand—or if that is a little out of the way, you could try one of the Nordic countries. To mark International Women’s Day, The Economist has compiled its own “glass-ceiling index” to show where women have the best chance of equal treatment at work. 
• Based on data mainly from the OECD, it compares five indicators across 26 countries: the number of men and women respectively with tertiary education; female labour-force participation; the male-female wage gap; the proportion of women in senior jobs; and net child-care costs relative to the average wage. 
• The first four are given equal weighting, the fifth a lower one, since not all working women have children. New Zealand scores high on all the indicators. 
• Finland does best on education; Sweden has the highest female labour-force participation rate, at 78%; and Spain has the smallest wage gap, at 6%. 
• The places not to be are South Korea and Japan, partly because so few women hold down senior jobs (though the new president of South Korea is a woman).

What really is Glass Ceiling Index?
 A glass ceiling is a political term used to describe “the unseen", yet unbreakable barrier that keeps minorities and women from rising to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications or achievements.

A glass ceiling inequality represents:

1. “A gender or racial difference that is not explained by other job-relevant characteristics of the employee.”
2. “A gender or racial difference that is greater at higher levels of an outcome than at lower levels of an outcome.
3. “A gender or racial inequality in the chances of advancement into higher levels, not merely the proportions of each gender or race currently at those higher levels.”
4. “A gender or racial inequality that increases over the course of a career.”

The glass ceiling metaphor has often been used to describe invisible barriers (“glass”) through which women can see elite positions but cannot reach them (“ceiling”). These barriers prevent large numbers of women and ethnic minorities from obtaining and securing the most powerful, prestigious, and highest-grossing jobs in the workforce.