Arctic Yearbook 2014 | Page 185

185 Arctic Yearbook 2014 Canadian communities ranked at the bottom of the Community Wellbeing Index were First Nations communities, while only one First Nations community was in the top 100 (Anaya 2014: 7). He also found a long list of severe violations of Aboriginal women’s rights (7-20). These First Nations communities are not all located in the Canadian Arctic, but they tend to be more northern and isolated compared with southern and more urbanized regions. Table 1: Human development, gender inequality, and indigenous development rankings Human Development Index Gender Inequality Index Indigenous Development Index Maternal death rate National seats held by women Women Men in paid in paid work work Norway 1 6 n.a. 7 39.5% 63.0% 71.0% USA 4 47 44 24 16.8% 58.4% 71.9% Canada 6 20 44 12 24.9% 62.7% 73.0% Sweden 10 1 n.a. 5 60.8% 69.2% Iceland 14 9 n.a. 5 71.7% 83.1% Denmark 16 3 n.a. 5 60.3% 70.6% Finland 22 5 n.a. 8 42.5% 57.0% 64.9% Russia 66 n.a. 39 11.5% 57.5% 68.2% 59 45.0% 42.9% 38.0% Sources: Human Development Index (HDI) and Gender Inequality Index (GII) ratings are reported in 2011 and are based on data from 2009 (UN, 2011: table 4, 139-140); Aboriginal Human Development Index figures are derived from the UN 2001 HDI and are based on 1999 data, but were only calculated for four countries (Cooke et al., 2007: table 6, 9). To date, no reports have been published regarding northern women’s rights generally, although the gender chapter in the Arctic Human Development Report (Williamson et al. 2004) did identify problems of migration, mobility, gendered violences, and political representation, and provides valuable contextual information.1 New research on these and other problems, such as the effects of crossborder marriages, intergenerational demographic changes, trafficking, diverse patterns of indigenous recognition and self-determination, and economic issues, is being conducted by the TUAQ network.2 Governance and Legal Structures Given the wealth and high levels of human development of the eight circumpolar countries, and particularly given the extremely high levels of gender equality attained by the Nordic countries, it is not surprising that almost all these countries have implemented domestic governance structures that have promoted equality between women and men. Nordic laws and policies do not all explicitly require sex equality or equality between women and men in those terms, but the more general concept of gender equality falls under general equality objectives, and many Nordic policies are expressly aimed at promoting equality between women and men (Gunnarsson and Svensson 2012; Gender Challenges & Human Capital in the Arctic