Of the four areas–health and survival, education, politics and economic equality–CR has to get astonishingly high marks for women’s educational and political equality. Ticas complete more years of schooling than Ticos do, and when they drop out they are more likely than males to return to school as adults. By law, half the legislature is female, and in practice half the judges are etc. Structurally, women are hardly politically unequal in CR. Since I can’t imagine that women’s health an survival suffer relative to men’s in CR, the only area where CR has a gender gap is in pay. This gap is real and wrong, but I doubt that comparing it with Nicaragua’s is very revealing. In Nicaragua, everyone is poor, and the able-bodied young men leave the country for work.

This said, I am aware of and impressed with some strands of Nicaraguan feminism, and suspect that it is far more sophisticated than CR’s (or feminism in the US for that matter). CR’s feminism strikes me as superficial yet shrill, and frequently quite silly. Nicas I think have a deeper and more nuanced feminist tradition, and one more rooted in their own experiences rather than copied from the US or Western Europe.

However, I have no idea how bean counters can conclude that CR is behind Nicaragua in a gender gap based upon what was allegedly measured.