Hey Tina, so are you quite sure that Italy's no country for a woman?

On the cover of the latest edition of Newsweek, the American newsmagazine recently relaunched by Tina Brown, the theme of women is featured again, this time with a wide-ranging international survey of the countries where it is best to be born a woman: not just better to be a woman than a man, but better in absolute terms. In the top ten, there is no sign of Italy at all, and we can live with that. In first place, there's Iceland (hey, they have a female prime minister), then there's Sweden (and we all know they give parents of both genders a good sixteen months of paternity/maternity leave on full salary), then Canada, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Norway, the USA, Australia and the Netherlands.

Newsweek examined 165 different countries around the world and awarded points according to five separate criteria: Health (including both full maternity coverage and access to abortion), Legal Rights, Education, the Economy and Public Life (ie women in positions of importance in government). It's probably fair to say that Italy does not deserve to be in the upper echelons of this chart, since we hardly meet the criteria, and we have a lot of work to do to get there: we lack the splendid welfare facilities of much of Northern Europe, nor can we boast the wonderful opportunities available to American woman (even though it needs to be explained to us how they manage to raise children and stay on their career tracks with a mere twelve weeks maternity leave, only available in companies with over fifty dependents, and at zero salary). But continuing to read the list of countries where women do best, we still don't come across Italy: there is New Zealand, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Macedonia, Moldavia, the Philippines, Belgium, Great Britain and Romania.

At this point we begin to wonder if they haven't been using some slightly strange criteria: Women from Moldavia, the Philippines and Romania are often obliged for economic reasons to leave their own children and to come and work for us here in Italy, this “awful place”, in the hope of discovering a better life for themselves and their children. However, according to Tina Brown, these are all countries which are “better”, from a woman's perspective, than Italy is. Which would appear to be a country totally dominated by male chauvinist values, which pays scant heed to “the plight of women” (as though we were taking about the terminal decline of the Panda population).

So it is with some trepidation that we run through the list of the countries where women live worst of all: places like Chad, Afghanistan, Yemen, Congo, Mali, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia – and we always feel grateful that Newsweek hasn't inserted Italy among them (at least, not yet). Or perhaps, instead of complaining any further, we should try and show Tina Brown that she's got the wrong end of the stick?