“No country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap,” the Geneva-based World Economic Forum said. While the US scores among the top three in education and access to health care, it drops to 66th in ‘political empowerment’ rankings with “no history of female leadership in the executive office,” the WEF said.

Under a United Nations convention dating from 1979, governments are committed to preventing discrimination against women and in 2000, the promotion of women’s rights was one of eight Millennium Development Goals. These UN targets aim to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, improve the health of women and children, fight HIV/AIDS and bring about environmental sustainability by 2015.

“It would be hard to say the Philippines is necessarily a better place for women to live than the US, but you can see that the gap between men and women in many developing countries is more equal partly out of economic necessity," Margareta Drzeniek, a senior economist at the WEF, said in an interview. “Because women have to work, there’s more acceptance" of them in positions of authority.

The study also found that within the 25-nation European Union, France and Italy at 70th and 77th respectively score lowest, behind China’s 63rd place and Brazil’s 67th. Sweden is the only country in the world where men and women hold equal numbers of positions in parliament and among government ministers.

 “Gender-based inequality is a phenomenon that transcends the majority of the world?s cultures, religions, nations and income groups," the WEF report said.

The World Economic Forum is funded by more than 1,000 corporations and best known for its annual conference in the Swiss ski-resort of Davos.