Desi Lydic: Abroad, on Comedy Central
Comedy Central; IMDb; YouTube

This is a one-hour special presented by The Daily Show, which aired in May 2019. In the week leading up to the special's premiere, there were some short videos on YouTube that promoted it. Some of them included scenes from the special, but there was also a lot of content that's not in the special, but is about the same topic. So I definitely think those are worth watching, in addition to the special. (There also seems to be an uncensored version of the special that you can watch on Comedy Central's website, if you log in with your cable or satellite information, which I can't do, so I don't know how much more it might include than the TV version.)

Anyway, it begins with Desi Lydic (a regular correspondent on The Daily Show) complaining to Trevor Noah that the World Economic Forum's annual Global Gender Gap Report (from 2017) placed the United States 49th in gender equality. (The report uses a formula that includes measurements of four different areas: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. In the PDF, you can see each of 144 countries' scores in each of those areas, as well as the index number. For example, the US actually ranked number 1 in educational attainment; although it tied with a bunch of other countries on the list, since it's about what percentage of a gap there is between men and women, and a lot of countries have apparently completely closed that gap, when it comes to education.) So... Desi travels to three different countries whose index number was higher than the U.S.'s. First she goes to Iceland, which ranked number 1 in the world overall (though it only ranked first in one specific area: political empowerment, and even there, the gap has not been completely closed). The second country she travels to is Namibia, which ranked number 13 (number 1 in health and survival, though again, the gap hasn't been completely closed). Finally, she traveled to Spain, which ranked 24 (although its highest specific rank was 22 in political empowerment). Throughout her travels, Desi talks with lots of different people from each country she visits, learning about how much better things are there in terms of gender equality than they are in the U.S. (both politically and in regular people's everyday lives), how things got that way, and how people feel about it. (Granted, there are possibly people in each country who aren't happy about it, but the people she talks with all seem to think their way of doing things is pretty good, and normal. And I assume they're in the majority.) I do want to mention that when I watch The Daily Show, I often worry about how people interviewed by its correspondents might take their satirical humor, in relation to serious topics. And I especially worried about it when Desi was talking to people from other cultures, many of whom probably have never seen the show. But maybe that's because I'm overly sensitive to awkwardness (that's certainly why I never watched "The Office"). Whatever, things seemed to go alright for Desi.

It concludes with Desi, back in America, throwing a "gender gap reveal party" when the 2018 report is released. I won't spoil how the U.S. fared that time around... but it probably won't surprise you. In any event, I found the whole special reasonably amusing, but mostly I liked it because of its addressing an important problem (or set of related problems) which we here in the U.S. (as well as people in every country) must work harder to fix. Seriously.