IT IS still common to see headlines announcing the first woman to occupy some important post or other. Asako Suzuki has just been appointed the first female board member at Honda, a Japanese carmaker. In January the Irish central bank appointed its first female deputy governor. And of course Hillary Clinton could become America’s first female president. But such milestones may not be much of a guide to the opportunities women have to make progress in the workplace.

So, in 2013, we created a “glass-ceiling index”, ranking countries by how good it is to be a working woman in each of them, to be published each year to mark International Women’s Day (March 8th). Our index now covers 29 countries; our website has a full, interactive version of the adjacent chart. Besides taking into account such things as women’s access to higher education, their labour-force participation, pay, business-school applications, representation in senior management and the cost of child care, this year we have added a new indicator: as well as measuring maternity-leave rights, we now include paternity leave.

Studies show that where new fathers take parental leave, mothers tend to return to the labour market, female employment is higher and the earnings gap between men and women is lower. Among countries in the OECD, a group mostly of rich countries, paid leave for new daddies generally remains short, averaging just eight weeks. Nine countries, America included, offer them none. Although they fare poorly on a number of other indicators, Japan and South Korea now offer the longest paternity leave in the OECD. In those two countries, fathers (and mothers) are entitled to more than 50 weeks’ paid leave.