For the second consecutive year, a wide survey found people in Latin America are the least likely to say they live in countries where women are treated with respect and dignity, ranking below the Middle East and North Africa.
The Gallup survey found a wide range of opinions within Latin America: while 63 percent of respondents in Ecuador said women get respect, only 20 percent said the same in Peru and Colombia.
“A median of 35 percent of adults across 22 Latin American countries said their women are treated [with respect] — about half as high as percentages in any other region of the world,” Gallup says.
Asia ranked highest in the survey, with 76 percent saying women are respected. Europe wasn’t far behind in second place, with 72 percent. The survey was conducted among thousands of people in some 150 countries in 2012 and 2013.
Update at 5 p.m. ET: The U.S. Results
Responding to a request for more information, Gallup says that in the U.S., 77 percent of respondents said women are treated with respect and dignity.
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Ecuador was the only Latin American nation where more than 60 percent of respondents said women were respected, a result that Gallup’s analysts attribute to new laws and awareness campaigns. It’s one of just five countries in the region where more than 50 percent said women are treated with respect.
The survey also found an interesting disparity: In some countries, men were far more likely than women to say that women are respected. The widest gap was in Jamaica, where men were more than twice as likely to say women were respected (41 percent to 19 percent). Argentina had the second-largest gap (50 percent to 36 percent).
Gallup says its survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews with around 1,000 people in 19 Latin American countries, and 500 in three others.
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