Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a central American country, located between Nicaragua and Panama, whose 4.3 million inhabitants enjoys a relatively high standard of living based on agriculture, tourism, and manufacturing. Women participate in all aspects of life in Costa Rica, including government. About 35 percent of the seats in Costa Rica's legislative assembly are held by women and in 2010 Costa Ricans elected their first woman president, Laura Chinchilla.

Overall, the World Economic Forum ranks Costa Rica 27th out of 134 countries on the Global Gender Gap Report, an index of equality between men and women (the United States ranked 31st). On a scale from 0 (inequality) to 1 (perfect equality), Costa Rica achieved an overall score of 0.718 and subscale scores of 0.9796 on health and ...