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