nymphocracy

Some secretly, some volubly but all of us agree that this world has been and probably would always be dominated by men. Women, despite relentless efforts and Utopian fantasies of feminists, have always remained subjects to men. But then how to measure the status of women in a society? Is there any way to quantify this womenfolk's position on social ladder vis-a-vis men? Frankly speaking I don't know, sociology is alien to me. But let us guess..

1. Ratio of girls to boys in schools/colleges:-
Nope, this is a bad idea. Not only in developing societies but also in developed societies education, though in varying degrees has been an instrument to get good job plus a high income husband for women.(This is how I interpret a chapter in a book titled 'superfreakonomics' which says that an average married man in US earns significantly higher than an equally qualified married woman even when childless. The authors also alludes to the same conclusion.) So this metric wont give credible estimates.

2. Number of woman employees in public and private sectors.
Public sector has women quotas so it's an enforced, state driven equality not a genuine one. Apart from that there are many kind of employments some man dominated, some woman dominated and also they all are divided into several categories which makes a straight forward analysis difficult.

Apart from these two other candidate metrics may be number of driving licenses issued to women, number of woman traveling in public/private transports but all have their shortcomings and none of them are simple.

So a crazy alternative- what about 'Number of public urinals for woman per hundred male public urinals'. Obviously these metric is simple to assess. Now let's see whether it's robust or not. Use of public urinals is directly proportional to the economic as well as social participation of either sex. If women participate in public life sufficiently and yet don't use PU's, that means that they are reluctant to use them and that's an indicator that they are still not on a par with men. Second thing is that PU metric shows no enforced equality, they are mostly built owing to necessity, not in order to flaunt government's goodwill towards women(for example in shopping malls urinals for both sexes will always be found in equal numbers- that shows that malls are frequented by both sexes alike.) We can also compare the figures from different countries because urinals like gods, are omnipresent.

PS: nymphocracy is hand-made combining nymph=a beautiful woman + cracy=a rule like in autocracy,democracy.