what is the largest gap between rank and approximate rank?

Why do Nordic countries rank only average or poor in health and survival of women whereas they perform much better in all other sub indexes of the Global Gender Gap report?

• This is with the exception of Finland which ranks the first. The ranking: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/oct/25/world-gender-gap-index-2013-countries-compare-iceland-uk

• Answer:

  If you look at rank, then you do indeed see Finland (and 32 other countries) on a shared #1 rank for health and survival, and the other Scandinavian countries near the middle. This indicator measures two things: One is gender-ratio at birth. The other is life-expectancy of women compared to life-expectancy of men. The gender-gap report measures gender-gap, not women's rights, i.e. you get a lower score if there's more of a DIFFERENCE between the genders, regardless of if women are the ones advantaged or the ones disadvantaged. Women live a few years longer than men (on the average) in most Scandinavian countries. Thus the "gap" here results from men being disadvantaged in this area. If you look at the actually underlying data then you see that there's no big difference in actual data. All the top 100 nations in the world are essentially "perfect" in this score in the sense that there's zero female infanticide and gender-selective abortions, and no difference between the genders in access to health-services. (The same is true for education: Women get -more- education on the average than men do in many countries, including the Scandinavian ones) Why women nevertheless tend to live longer is a good question. Perhaps a part of it is biological. (women live longer in most countries, after all) And part of it might actually be sexism towards men. It is for example a fact that breast-cancer and prostate-cancer are similarly common, and kill similar amounts of people every year, but that breast-cancer nevertheless receives something like 4 times the research-funding. To find actual differences, you need to look at score, not at rank. Imagine ten people run a race. They complete it in this many seconds: 307, 307, 307, 308, 308, 309, 350, 361, 394, 412 The one who completed it in 309 seconds is ranked 6/10, or under average, but if you look at the actual time then you see that in fact the times vary between 307 and 412, and her actual time (309) is almost at top of the scale.