The Global Gender Gap Report 2010

One month ago, the World Economic Forum released it's The Global Gender Gap Report 2010. Here's what page 3 of the report had to say:

Gender equality vs. women’s empowerment:

The third distinguishing feature of the Global Gender Gap Index is that it ranks countries according to their proximity to gender equality rather than to women’s empowerment. Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen variables has
declined, rather than whether women are “winning” the “battle of the sexes”. Hence, the Index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men in particular variables.

As it "neither rewards nor penalizes" cases in which women are outperforming men, but penalizes instances in which men are outperforming women, despite its claims otherwise isn't this doing exactly what which it claims not to do: i.e. it's a measure of "women's empowerment" (as opposed to, e.g., average female happiness) rather than a measure of a global gender gap.

This seems to become more explicit later on. To quote a later section of the report (p. 4/5):

The type of scale chosen determines whether the
index is rewarding women’s empowerment or gender
equality. To capture gender equality, two possible scales
were considered.One was a negative-positive scale capturing
the size and direction of the gender gap.This scale essentially penalizes either men’s advantage over women or
women’s advantage over men, and gives the highest points to absolute equality.The second was a one-sided scale
that measures how close women are to reaching parity
with men but does not reward or penalize countries for
having a gender gap in the other direction.Thus it does
not reward countries for having exceeded the parity
benchmark. We find the one-sided scale more appropriate
for our purposes.

They've also adjusted the meaning of "equality" itself, "the healthy life expectancy benchmark is set to be 1.06" (i.e. under equality women are expected to live 6% longer lives).

This seems fairly typical in the developed world, but you should also take into account that women account for a significant majority of healthcare spending, with most of this additional spending being incurred outside childbearing years. (See, e.g., Gender differences in health care expenditures, resource utilization, and quality of care).

Politics as usual...