NEW YORK

The United States slipped in this year's scorecard measuring equality between women and men while Nordic countries remained at the top of the list and Muslim countries at the bottom.

No country managed to close the gender gap entirely, the Swiss-based World Economic Forum found, but women in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland came closest to achieving equality with men in education, employment, health and politics.

The Global Gender Gap Report released Thursday, which ranked 128 countries representing 93 percent of the world's population, showed that the highest ranking countries closed about 80 percent of the gender gap while the lowest ranking closed just over 45 percent.

Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder and executive chairman, said in a statement that the report captures the magnitude of gender-based disparities across the world and tracks them over time.

"As policymakers and business leaders seek to address talent shortages, there is increasing urgency to close gender gaps and leverage the talents of both women and men," he said.

At a news conference launching the report, co-author Laura Tyson, a professor of business administration and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, said most countries have done very well in closing the health and education gaps but there are wide variations in economic and political opportunities for women.

"One half of the talent pool of nations is female, and if you educate and maintain the health of, and give economic and political opportunity to that talent base, you're likely to have a healthy economy," said Tyson, who was former President Bill Clinton's top economic adviser. "One of the things we found both this year and last year is that if you rank countries on their competitive index ... and you rank them on their gender gap you can see a correlation."

Ricardo Hausmann, another co-author who directs the Center for International Development at Harvard University, said there are still some very important gaps, but he is "somewhat optimistic" because the gaps are narrowing in many countries.