JAMES TARANTO: You’ve Come a Long Way, Elska: The truth about the “best countries for women.”

The report, as per Gummow, ranks countries “across four primary areas including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival.” It uses a 1-point scale, with “1 representing total gender equality and 0 depicting inequality.” The U.S. gets a 0.7392, “which is actually worse than the score it received the year before when it was ranked 22nd.”

This exercise is silly in many ways, the funniest of which is the false precision. In reality, “gender equality” is not susceptible to quantitative measurement. The WEF derives its number by applying a made-up formula to an arbitrarily chosen group of data sets such as sex ratios within national legislatures. . . .

Gummow lists the 10 countries that received the highest “equality” scores from the WEF. Every Scandinavian country makes the top 10, and the top 4 are, in order, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Denmark is a slight laggard at No. 8.

That is consistent with the common stereotype of “a female Paradise on earth,” as Alison Wolf puts it in her new book, “The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World.” Wolf observes that “Scandinavians are seen by the world, and they see themselves, as flagbearers for sexual equality. They are peaceful, egalitarian and economically successful; and they pioneered social programs designed to guarantee opportunities for women.”

But there’s trouble in paradise. One measure the WEF study doesn’t use to gauge equality is occupational “gender segregation”–the degree to which men work in “male jobs” and women in “female” ones. Guess what? “The highest levels of gender segregation anywhere in the developed world are found in the labor markets of egalitarian welfare-state Scandinavia,” Wolf reports. “The International Labor Organization . . . has calculated that if you wanted to make all occupations ‘gender neutral,’ about a third of all Scandinavian workers would have to move to completely different occupations,.”

As Wolf explains, that inequality is a consequence of Scandinavia’s commitment to equality. Nordic women are well-represented in the kind of high-status professional jobs on which feminists tend to focus their attention. That is in part because the welfare state eases the temporal burdens of motherhood by providing extensive day-care services. Day-care workers are mostly female. And low-status traditionally male occupations have remained so; there aren’t a lot of female truck drivers in Iceland or Sweden.

So the Scandinavians have promoted equality in the elite workforce by diminishing it among nonelite workers.

That’s pretty much the feminist agenda in a nutshell.