Little attention has been paid to the economic success and overall happiness of nations with the lowest gender gaps.

Happiness is often seen as an elusive feeling, a fleeting moment in a person’s life. National happiness may seem absurd, but a recent United Nations report reveals that happiness can in fact be a public policy with very positive results. the World Happiness Report 2021 shows that high levels of public spending on human infrastructure – the services and systems that improve people’s quality of life – are the key to happiness.

The best ranked countries in the World Happiness Report share this high level of public investment in human infrastructure. Finland came first for the fourth year in a row, followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland and the Netherlands. They have very healthy market economies precisely because they invest heavily in personal care, from birth.

These countries are not socialist, they just have more women in leadership positions.

Finland, for example, passed the Parliament Act to give women the right to vote and stand in parliamentary elections in 1906, long before the United States, and today women make up about half of the Finnish national legislature.

However, neither the World Happiness Report nor do policy makers recognize the link between the two: human infrastructure is supported by women in leadership positions in government. This correlation can be explained by another fact still generally ignored: that care work, such as caring for children and the elderly, has been devalued under a system of hidden gender values ​​that has accompanied the classification of men. masculinity ”compared to women. /”femininity.”

Women in leadership positions understand this historic model and that its solution is to provide families with more choices to access public services that help nurture human development and balance the gender division of labor. Therefore, the presence of women in government leads to more benevolent policies that support human infrastructure for everyone, from high quality preschool education to universal health care.

However, women’s participation in government policy making requires a pre-existing high status of women in general. International studies show that the status of women is a powerful indicator of a country’s overall quality of life and economic success.

Already in 1995, on the basis of statistical data from 89 countries, the Center for Partnership Studies published a report entitled Women, men and the global quality of life demonstrating this exact correlation. Since then, other studies such as Global Values ​​Survey and the World Economic Forums Gender Gap Reports also confirmed the correlation between a country’s standard of living and economy and the status of women.

The increase in the status of women allows women to run for office. However, little attention has been paid to the economic success of countries with the smallest gender gaps, such as Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

In fact, greater appreciation of the female stereotype – benevolence, care and non-violence – is not only good for women. It is also good for men and children of both sexes, as well as for companies.

President Biden began pushing for more caring public policies, such as the U.S. Plan for Families, to improve public services and tackle the economic and gender inequalities that have proven so damaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. . In light of this approach, the successes of the Global Happiness Report 2021 ensure that a shift towards benevolent policies and public welfare does not exhaust the economy, but rather the opposite.

President Biden’s investment in human infrastructure is especially critical at a time when economists tell us that the most important capital of our post-industrial age is what they call “high-quality human capital”: flexible, creative and resilient people. Neurosciences Studies show that the development of such human capital largely depends on the quality of care and education that children receive from an early age.

In other words, investing in what was once considered “women’s work” is the key to success in our new technological age.

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