The Illusion of the Gender Gap Index and the Reality of Sweden’s Welfare State | Kumiko Takeuchi Questions the Idea of Gender Equality

May 23, 2026
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Kyoto University, No. 1
Originally published on October 29, 2019. This article quotes an essay by Kumiko Takeuchi published in the Sankei Shimbun and discusses the Gender Gap Index, Nordic welfare states, Swedish society, crime rates, the breakdown of the family, gender equality policies, and the resilience of traditional societies.
October 29, 2019
According to data from the late 1990s, compared with Japan during the same period, the overall incidence of criminal offenses was 17 times higher, rape was more than 20 times higher, and robbery was seven times higher (four times higher than in the United States)—figures that seem almost unbelievable.
I am republishing the article I posted on September 4.
The reason is that the Japanese people must now read the painstaking work of Kumiko Takeuchi, a Kyoto University graduate and one of the world’s foremost researchers of animal behavior.
The following is from an essay by animal behavior researcher and essayist Kumiko Takeuchi, published in today’s Sankei Shimbun under the title “They Talk of Eliminating the ‘Gender Gap,’ but…”
Until August five years ago, when I was still subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun, I knew nothing about Ms. Takeuchi.
Needless to say, Kyoto University is one of Japan’s finest universities, where people blessed with outstanding intellect study.
It goes without saying that it is also one of the world’s finest universities.
Ms. Takeuchi is a person worthy of having studied at Kyoto University, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that she possesses an intellect equal to that of Tadao Umesao.
Before the House of Councillors election, Kuwako suddenly made the foolish comment on NHK’s watch9 that Japan was lagging behind, during a feature about the small number of female legislators in Japan.
The next day, the Constitutional Democratic Party announced to the media that it would field many female candidates in the House of Councillors election.
It was a report that laid bare the connection between those who control NHK’s news division, Kuwako and Arima, and the Constitutional Democratic Party.
This is an essay that those who control NHK’s news division, Kuwako and Arima, the Constitutional Democratic Party, and its supporters must read with their eyes wide open.
Kuwako and Arima, among others, will surely be too ashamed ever to call themselves news anchors again.
Yet they will probably try to carry on without a word of reflection, with the shamelessness characteristic of them and of China and the Korean Peninsula.
The following is Kumiko Takeuchi’s essay.
There is a term called the “Gender Gap Index.”
It contains a number of indicators in four areas—economic participation, education, health, and political participation—and shows the ratio of women to men when men are assigned a value of 1.
A value of 1 represents complete equality between men and women, and the question is how close a country comes to 1.
Japan’s overall Gender Gap Index for 2018 was 0.662.
It ranked 110th out of 149 countries.
Numbers Alone Can Be Misleading
Even so, this was a slight improvement over its ranking of 114th out of 144 countries in the preceding year, 2017, with improvement particularly noticeable in the area of “economic participation.”
Meanwhile, the top five countries were Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Nicaragua, in that order.
Nicaragua’s position was the result of the effectiveness of its recent efforts toward gender equality, but the others, as expected, were Nordic welfare states where equality between men and women had long been advocated.
However, with statistics like these, judging by numbers alone can lead one to misunderstand the essence of the matter.
For example, women account for about 40 percent of Sweden’s members of parliament.
If this had happened naturally, Sweden would be praised as a society in which women can shine to such an extent.
But that is not the reality: this proportion exists because an allocation system called the “quota system” stipulates that women should hold roughly this share of seats.
This is a digression, but I was so astonished that I want to say something about it.
Within the “health” area of the Gender Gap Index are indicators called the “sex ratio at birth” and the “female-to-male ratio of healthy life expectancy,” which are treated as reflecting a gap between men and women.
Slightly more boys than girls are born.
This is entirely a biological matter: one reason is that males are more likely to die throughout their lives, so slightly more are born in order for the ratio of men to women to become one to one by the time they reach reproductive age.
Women’s longer life expectancy is also a matter of biology.
The existence of a gap does not make it something that ought to be corrected.
What Is a Welfare State Without Disparities?
In any case, this raises the question of what a welfare state that seeks to eliminate disparities among people, beginning with inequality between men and women, is really like.
I therefore wanted to learn about Sweden, which is said to lead the world in women’s participation in society and has even given rise to the term “the Swedish model,” so I consulted various sources.
The source I relied on most was The Struggle of the Welfare State: Lessons from Sweden (Chuko Shinsho, published in 2001), by Tatsuo Takeda, who is thoroughly familiar both with the Swedish national character and with conditions within the country.
Mr. Takeda has served in the Japanese embassy in Sweden and as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs official responsible for Nordic affairs, among other positions.
According to Mr. Takeda, the 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the Swedish welfare state, when even a wallet left in a taxi would be properly returned, but crime gradually increased following the economic stagnation that began in the late 1980s.
According to data from the late 1990s, compared with Japan during the same period, the overall incidence of criminal offenses was 17 times higher, rape was more than 20 times higher, and robbery was seven times higher (four times higher than in the United States)—figures that seem almost unbelievable.
Other crimes, including those involving drugs and alcohol and the smuggling of child pornography into and out of the country, were also numerous.
According to an American scholar, one of the causes of such social problems in Sweden is women.
Contemporary Swedish women are taught egalitarianism in addition to the individualism and rational way of thinking originally characteristic of Swedes.
As a result, they have a strong desire for independence, are emotionally unsettled, and consider women’s liberation and the improvement of their status more important than marital love.
Men, on the other hand, seek kindness and the warmth of a home, which are instinctive desires of men.
Recognize the Resilience of Traditional Society
And it is uncommon for husbands and wives to care for and respect one another, to yield at times, and to cooperate.
Naturally, relationships between men and women do not go well, and divorce is extremely common.
Children grow up starved of love and bear emotional wounds, eventually becoming caught in a whirlpool of distrust of others and loneliness.
Mr. Takeda concludes, “When relations between men and women have collapsed, there is nothing that can be done.”
In another interview, when a person over 100 years old was asked, “What has changed the most during your lifetime?” the answer was reportedly “the breakdown of the family.”
Seen in this light, a welfare state built on equality between men and women may look good in numerical terms, but its reality is bleak, and it is by no means a prosperous society.
I believe that attempts by human beings to design a society according to what they think it ought to be are extremely dangerous.
Everyone has learned that communist states fail.
An extreme welfare state may follow the same path.
By contrast, traditional societies, which were not drawn up as anyone’s ideal but arose naturally, are resilient.
They have endured the weight of time and survived; in a sense, they are like the result of natural selection.
We must not abandon tradition.
Once tradition is abandoned, recovering it is almost impossible.
(Kumiko Takeuchi)