The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2014 is an annual assessment of the size of "the gender gap"--an index of female-to-male ratios in areas such as literacy rates, life expectancy, parliamentary representation, and labor force participation--in 142 nations around the world. The report compares nations on an equal footing. It only looks at the relative gap between men and women in each country regardless of that nation's level of overall development. Therefore, a lower-middle income nation like Nicaragua, having closed 79% of its gender gap, ranks #6 on the global list, while the United States is only #20, with U.S. women achieving only 74.6% of the rate of U.S. men.