The poor developing countries were expected to gradually get out of misery with the help of development aid and family planning. And no major countries were found in the middle -- in the wide gap between the West and the rest. The only exceptions were a few small island nation states like Singapore, Hong Kong and also Cuba.

This is a giant step towards -- and in many cases beyond -- one of the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals: to eliminate gender disparity in all levels of education by 2015.