I think that UN manipulating it's own index is not culture wars even if the index is related to gender. Let me know if I am wrong.
Human development
The Gender Development Index (GDI), along with its more famous sibling Human Development Index (HDI) is a an index published annually by UN's agency, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Whether an index is manipulated or not can be judged only against a precise definition of what the index claims to be measuring. So how do you measure human development? Whatever you do, you will never capture all nuances of the real world - you will have to simplify. The UNDP puts it this way:
The Human Development Index (HDI) was created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone.
So the UNDP defines the Human Development Index as a geometric mean of three dimensions represented by four indices:
| Dimension | Index |
|---|---|
| Long and healthy life | Life expectancy at birth (years) |
| Knowledge | Expected years of schooling (years) |
| Mean years of schooling (years) | |
| Decent standard of living | Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (2017 PPP$) |
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI
Gender Development
So far so good. Next, on it's website the Gender Development Index (GDI) is defined like this:
GDI measures gender inequalities in achievement in three basic dimensions of human development: health, measured by female and male life expectancy at birth; education, measured by female and male expected years of schooling for children and female and male mean years of schooling for adults ages 25 years and older; and command over economic resources, measured by female and male estimated earned income.
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/gender-development-index#/indicies/GDI
While in the actual report HDI it is simply defined as a ratio of female to male HDI values:
Definitions - Gender Development Index: Ratio of female to male HDI values.
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/hdr2021-22pdf_1.pdf
Let's look, for instance, at the Gender Development Index of United Kingdom. The value 0.987 means that despite longer life and more education, in UK, females are less developed than males.
| Dimension | Index | Female value | Male value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long and healthy life | Life expectancy at birth (years) | 82.2 | 78.7 |
| Knowledge | Expected years of schooling (years) | 17.8 | 16.8 |
| Mean years of schooling (years) | 13.4 | 13.4 | |
| Decent standard of living | Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (2017 PPP$) | 37,374 | 53,265 |
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/hdr2021-22pdf_1.pdf
Wait, what?? What does it mean that females in UK have command over economic resources of post Soviet Estonia (GNI Estonia=38,048) while males in UK have command over economic resources of EU leader Germany (GNI Germany=54,534)?
The manipulation
The UNDP calculates separate command over economic resources for females and males, as a product of the actual Gross National Income (GNI) and two indices: female and male shares of the economically active population (the non-adjusted employment gap) and the ratio of the female to male wage in all sectors (the non-adjusted wage gap).
The UNDP provides this simple example about Mauritania:
Gross National Income per capita of Mauritania (2017 PPP $) = 5,075
| Indicator | Female value | Male value |
|---|---|---|
| Wage ratio (female/male) | 0.8 | 0.8 |
| Share of economically active population | 0.307 | 0.693 |
| Share of population | 0.51016 | 0.48984 |
| Gross national income per capita (2017 PPP $) | 2,604 | 7,650 |
According to this index, males in Mauritania enjoy the command over economic resources of Viet Nam (GNI Viet Nam=7,867) while females in Mauritania suffer the command over economic resources of Haiti (GNI Haiti=2,847).
Let's be honest here: this is total bullshit. There are two reasons why you cannot use raw employment gap and raw wage gap for calculating the command over economic resources:
Argument 1
Bread winners share income with their families. This is a no brainer. All over the world, men are expected to fulfil their gender role as a bread winer. This does not mean that they keep the pay check for themselves while their wives and children starve to death. Imagine this scenario: a poor father from India travels to Qatar where he labours in deadly conditions, so that his family can live a slightly better life. According to UNDP, he just became more developed, while the standard of living his wife is exactly zero.
Argument 2
Governments redistribute wealth. This is a no brainer too. One's command over economic resources and standard of living is not equal to ones pay check. There are social programs, pensions, public infrastructure. Even if you have never earned a pay check yourself, you can take a public transport on a public road to the next public hospital. Judging by the Tax Freedom Day, states around the world redistribute 30% to 50% of all income. And while men pay most of the taxis (obviously, they have higher wages) women receive most of the subsidies (obviously, they have lover wages). But according the UNDP, women in India (female GNI 2,277) suffer in schools and hospitals of the war-torn Rwanda, while men in India (male GNI 10,633) enjoy the infrastructure and social security of the 5-times more prosperous Turkey.
Don't get me wrong, the employment gap and pay gap are not irrelevant for the standard of living and command over economic resources. Pensions and social security schemes mostly do not respect the shared family income and as a result the partner doing less paid work - usually a women - gets lower pension, unemployment benefit etc. What's worse, the non-working partner is severely disadvantaged in case of divorce or break up. But while this has an impact on each gender's standard of living it certainly does not define 100% of that value.
Argument 3
You may argue that the command over economic resources measured by estimated earned income is some kind of proxy for all other disadvantages women face in society. But do you remember what I said in the beginning?
Whether an index is manipulated or not can be judged only against a precise definition of what the index claims to be measuring.
The HDI measures "people and their capabilities" and the GDI is a ratio of these capabilities measured separately for men and women. The economic dimension of the GDI is supposed to be standard of living or command over economic resources - neither of which can be represented by earned income alone.
The taboo
Wikipedia says: "For most countries, the earned-income gap accounts for more than 90% of the gender penalty." (I have not verified this.) This is important, because when we look at the other two dimensions it becomes clear that while men have shorter and less health lives they also increasingly fall behind in mean and expected years of schooling. Without the misrepresentation of the command over economic resources value, the index would show something very uncomfortable: that according to UN's own definition of Human Development men are the less developed gender.
PS: Is there a way to give those tables some borders and padding?
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Notes -
Aside from the economic component, I found the derivation of the lifespan component... well, not shocking, but very biased, in a very literal sense.
The index is explicitly constructed assuming an inherent lifespan difference between men and women of 5 years; if men live 82.5 years and women live 87.5 years, that's definitionally equal. That's an explicit assumption that that's just the natural state of the world and meaningless when it comes to trying to measure gender inequality. Among the top 1% of households in the US, women outlive men by only 1.5 years, and if you compare monks and nuns the difference is even smaller. Even if you're looking at entire countries, e.g. Iceland only has a difference of 2.9 years (and in fact is penalized for it in the index, presumably because it is sexist in denying women the healthcare they need to achieve their five years over men's 82.3).
Social factors play a significant role, and adding an arbitrary fudge factor to diminish them betrays an agenda.
I know some indexes do this, notably the WEF Gender Gap, but I didn't know this applies to GDI as well. Where did you find it?
Technical notes on the index from the UN:
https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2021-22_HDR/hdr2021-22_technical_notes.pdf
See Technical Note 3, step 2, "Normalizing the indicators."
Their justification is that it's "biological" but offer no particular explanation of how they calculated that it was 5 years exactly. As far as I can tell, they just took the worldwide average difference in life expectancy and declared it to be biological.
I would also note that they don't make a similar calculation of average difference in labor force participation, declare it biological, and correct for it when calculating their economic indicators.
ETA: looking at the WEF Gender Gap full report, they explicitly cite the UN and GDI as justification for treating "parity" as a five year gap in favor of women.
Fuuuuuuuuuck!!!!
How did I miss this? TBH I am enraged.
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I hadn’t heard of the GDI before (outside of Command and Conquer), so I was curious about its history.
A few choice notes from the 2018 data, per wiki:
coolestmost gender-egalitarian country in the world.There are clearly some land mines in this metric. Wikipedia is plastered with warnings that
Unfortunately, to get the component measures, I had to go to this table. On mobile, that means I can’t really do summary stats. I suspect GDI is anti-correlated with the lifespan difference, as countries which have the same male and female lifespan are the ones where everyone fucking dies young.
While this is true for life expectancy, the division of paid/unpaid labour mostly runs in the opposite direction (up to a point - in most gender equal of countries it changes direction again, as women choose to spend more time with their children and choose part-time employment more often than in middle income countries).
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It is very nice of him to send money home to his wife and family. It is a good thing for women in his homeland if most men choose to do this.
But he could still decide to stop doing that at literally any moment. If his wife displeases him, if he meets someone else there, if he runs into trouble and needs the money for himself, if he acquires a drug or gambling problem, or just if he feels like it.
Yes, he has complete and total command over those economic resources.
That he chooses to spend them on his wife is nice for her, but it doesn't change who commands them.
This is not a distinction without a difference. being dependent on someone else for your ability to survive is essentially and massively different from being self-sufficient. And when an entire class of people is in that dependent position, it changes how society conceives of and treats those people, how they conceive of and treat themselves.
This is very much the type of thing the index is meant to measure.
What happens when he comes home after he does this? Does his community welcome him back with open arms? I feel like, as always, there's a part of the picture here we're not considering.
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So could anyone else. If a woman is employed, her employer could fire her. If she works in a store the government could zone the area and make it illegal to operate the store.
There's a difference between a not 100% certain source of income and no income. Counting the former as the latter is lying with figures.
But if I am a woman who depends on my husband for income, all those things could happen re my husband's job. So, aren't I doubly dependent, relative to a woman who earns her own income? Seems like a meaningful distinction to me.
Is it a meaningful enough distinction to send your daughter to live in Qatar?
As I understand it, the GDI is not neant to be used for that purpose. Per Wikipedia, "The GDI cannot be used independently from the HDI score, and so, it cannot be used on its own as an indicator of gender gaps. Only the gap between the HDI and the GDI can actually be accurately considered; the GDI on its own is not an independent measure of gender gaps."
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Sure. Come up with some factor to take this account, justify it as best you can, and multiply by it.
However, this factor won't be zero.
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What does it mean to earn your own income? If your customers are mostly men, are you earning your own income? After all, the men could choose to stop patronizing your business at any moment. That's not much different from the husband who could stop sending remittances at any moment.
Yes, that's why financial advisors always say that putting all of your money in one stock is exactly as safe as buying index funds.
They say that putting your money in one stock is risky, but they don't say that putting money into one stock is so risky that the stock counts as having zero income when making income comparisons.
I agree, being supported by your husband is somewhere in between as secure as 'having no money whatsoever' and 'earning your own money'.
But that's not a problem with the scale, it's just what the scale is actually measuring.
Every scale with a problem is measuring something. If the scale accidentally divided female lifespan by two, you could say "it still measures something, it measures whether female lifespan divided by two is less than male lifespan. It's just that that measure isn't very useful".
Ok.
That's not actually an argument against the thing the scale is measuring, which I've spent a bunch of comments discussing already.
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I don't think anyone is confused into thinking that in the countries with a low index 100% of women starve to death because they have no income and thus no access to resources from any source.
Countries like that don't and haven't existed, so it would be a weird thing to put this much effort into measuring.
What has and does exist is countries where women are dependent on men for resources, and thus have less power and self-determination.
That's a thing that makes sense to measure since it varies a lot between cultures, and it sure seems to be what this index is measuring.
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Yes he could, and it sometimes happen. But that is an edge case, not average. Married couples share their income more often than not. Why do you think marketers say that women make majority of the purchasing decisions? The idex measures averages, not worst case scenarios.
Not true. You disregard both the social norms and the laws that govern the sharing of wealth in marriage. By default half of all wealth they own is hers.
Do you have a source for that claim? Because the authors of the index are saying something different.
This reinforces @guesswho 's point. The index, or more precisely, the specific element of the index that we are discussing, is trying to measure economic control. The woman who relies on her husband indeed has less control, on average, than a woman who earns her own income. A woman who has a ten pct chance of having her income obliterated by a natural or an economic catastrophe and a 10 pct chance of it being devastated by her husband's death or abandonment is less secure than a woman who only is at risk from the former.
Consider two scenarios:
A single woman working retail part-time making minimum wage (say, $10k/year)
A wife working as an unpaid homemaker to a partner at a law firm making $1M/year.
Would you say the woman working retail has more command over economic resources than the homemaker? To me, she pretty clearly does not: earning a wage isn't the only way to have command over economic resources. Her intra-household negotiating power translates to external economic power.
A fairer comparison might be a single woman making $50k/year and a homemaking wife married to a man making $100k/year (both post tax, for simplicity). This is a much murkier comparison, and I'd say the single woman does have more command over economic resources (though it depends on culture and household dynamics). But that homemaker would still typically be much closer in command of resources to the single woman making $50k/year than to a single woman making $0/year.
Well, again, that depends on whether the point is to measure the ability to consume, the degree of economic independence, or a little of both.
And, let me give you a hypothetical:
Surely an index which purports to assess gender equality should not equate them.
And, taking a step back, as I have said before, all indexes are going to be imprecise. The problem arises when indexes are used to make fine grained comparison (eg, "the US has less press freedom than Norway because the US scores 95 on a press freedom index and Norway scores 97) for which they are not designed (and not that the GDI is apparently not meant to be a stand alone metric in the first place. It is meant to be compared to the Human Development Index, which is why it has the same three components).
The answer is that the woman getting 100K from her husband shouldn't be equated to one who earns 100k from employment, but she shouldn't be equated to someone making zero either. Which the index does. There's a big difference between "not equivalent" and "so not equivalent that it may as well be zero".
The "adjustment" I suggest is "don't use zero", so this question doesn't make sense.
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I don't take issue with the idea that indices can be useful despite being imprecise. My point is more that this particular metric fails to capture a significant part of economic power, enough so that it isn't an effective proxy for whatever it's trying to represent.
It also equates an Afghan homemaker making $0 with an American homemaker making $0: surely an index which purports to measure gender equality should not equate them either?
I think the fundamental flaw of using ratio of earned income and formal labor force participation as proxies for command over economic resources is that being a wage earner means simply that: you are providing labor in exchange for money. Within a household, economic organization is usually in-kind, but the non-earner nearly always has substantial power to determine the structure of that internal economic organization and consumption patterns. Assuming definitionally that that is zero is the mirror error as a husband who says his homemaking wife contributes nothing to the household because she doesn't earn money.
I'm thinking about would be a more meaningful metric. My initial gut reaction is the proportion of household consumption that is determined by each gender, and definitionally I think that's right. But it's unclear how to get a metric representing that: women are usually the immediate agents for household spending, but that says little to nothing about who decided what the spending should be. I think maybe tracking how consumption patterns change before and after marriage is better at getting at it, but that has its own issues, like only capturing newly married couples and not existing relationships.
It also depends on what the metric is intended to be used for. The name suggests it's for something like generalized wellbeing of each gender, which is how it's usually represented in the media; perhaps that's to the credit of
Yes, it would be difficult to get that data from very many countries
I don't know that the name was particularly well chosen, though of course it was almost certainly meant to carry a particular technical meaning, rather than a vernacular meaning.
As for its intended use, it was meant to be a supplement to the Human Development Index, and per Wikipedia it is was never meant to be "an independent measure of gender gaps when it is not, in fact, intended to be interpreted in that way, because it can only be used in combination with the scores from the Human Development Index, but not on its own."
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Less control on average, certainly yes, but not zero control on overage. In your example, if women has "10 pct chance of it being devastated by her husband's death or abandonment" then she has on average 90% control of the wealth, not 0.
Consider the case of MacKenzie Scott (Bezos). You and the GDI index say her command over economic resources is 0, while in fact after her divorce from Bezos she was worth $62 billion.
Please do not say that "I and the GDI Index" say that. The GDI says that. I said "A woman who has a ten pct chance of having her income obliterated by a natural or an economic catastrophe and a 10 pct chance of it being devastated by her husband's death or abandonment is less secure than a woman who only is at risk from the former."
This is an argument that the index is imperfect. But everyone knows that. The data needed to make it more precise by taking into account the factors you discuss is almost certainly not available for most countries. But the index, despite its imprecision, might nevertheless be accurate, in the sense that a change in the index is likely to correspond with actual changes on the ground in what it seeks to measure. Adding incomplete or poorly measured adjustments like the one you suggest might well make the index worse at reflecting reality.
It's not randomly imperfect; it's imperfect in a way biased towards a conclusion. An index that is imperfect in this manner is unsuitable to use for forming policy, but forming policy is the whole point of having the index.
I feel like there's a bit of a motte-and-bailey going on here.
The motte is that the GDI is an entirely synthetic metric meant for highly technical, specialized analyses; that it's unsuitable for comparing gender differences; and anyone expecting to be able to use it as such is misapplying it.
The bailey is that it's used as a measure of female oppression, which the creators of it know and which is why they choose to add particular components to it and add things like the life expectancy correction, which is pointless if the goal is just tracking trends in whitepapers but very important if you want to be able to use the GDI as evidence that women have it worse than men pretty much everywhere.
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1 Sorry.
2
To the contrary. Consider the case of Nordic countries. They are generally considered at the top of gender equality. And because married women feel safe and have choices, they CHOOSE to spend more time at home with children and CHOOSE to work part-time instead of full-time. But the GDI interprets this as women being less developed.
I am not suggesting any such thing, but consider your own argument from another perspective: Isn't it the UNDP that is adding incomplete or poorly measured adjustment to the measure of command over economic resources in the form of non-adjusted employment gap and the non-adjusted wage gap?
NP
Sure, but this is essentially a claim that the index is imperfect, isn't it? No matter how an index that covers every country in the world is constructed, it is going to miss nuances somewhere. In some places, it is going to overstate inequality, and in others it is going to understate inequality. That is the nature of the beast. And, as I said, "a change in the index is likely to correspond with actual changes on the ground in what it seeks to measure." That is all one can hope for, unfortunately.
There seems to be a bunch of stuff going on under the hood. Whether that is good, bad or indifferent is another question; the linked article obviously is suggesting improvements.
Again, I have no doubt that the GDI can be improved. But the initial claim was that it is invalid, and that does not follow from the fact that it can be improved.
This is a truism. I don't require an index to be perfect, I require an index to not be obviously flawed. Following your statement that "change in the index is likely to correspond with actual changes on the ground", the answer is: not necessarily. Nevertheless, it is not only the direction but also the amplitude of what it measures. And I think I proved beyond reasonable doubt that "command over economic resources" can not be measured by salary.
I said "The UNDP calculates separate command over economic resources for females and males, as a product of the actual Gross National Income (GNI) and two indices: female and male shares of the economically active population (the non-adjusted employment gap) and the ratio of the female to male wage in all sectors (the non-adjusted wage gap)." How is this different from your link? I don't see it.
My argument is not about the quality of the gathered data, my argument is that it does not measure what it says it measures not even in principle. Standard of living or command over economic resources can not be measured with individual's salary. Not even in principle. Up to 50% of wealth is redistributed by the state, large part of which are direct financial transfers to population. The split of wealth in marriage is closer to 50/50 that to 0/100.
The index is not not imperfect, it is principally incorrect.
To clarify, I poorly quoted myself. I did not mean to say that this index actually does that, but rather that whether it does so is the correct metric to use in judging it.
No, you haven't. It seems to a perfectly reasonable way to estimate what I understand them to be trying to measure. Whether that is the same as what you understand them to be trying to measure is a different question.
My main point was, "There seems to be a bunch of stuff going on under the hood." Meaning that neither of us know much about their precise methodology.
*and the norm, even among rich countries, is twenty percent, tops
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Could he? Most countries have laws against that sort of thing, including alimony. Once they are married, he has literally signed away at least half of his own right to that money.
I looked into the Census Bureau source that this statistic is based on, and the data seems to be based off self-reports by custodial parents, it is not being based off any kind of formal tracking of child support (that method of doing things poses problems too, as it does not include payments made through unofficial channels, but I won't get into that at the moment). Here are some selected quotes:
The technical documentation, which can be found here on the Census Bureau's website, notes this, too: "All household members 15 years of age and older that are biological parents of children in the household that have an absent parent were asked detailed questions about child support and alimony." It is asking the custodial parent, the one with the child in their household, not the non-custodial parent. And looking at the questionnaire used to assess child support payment makes it very clear that the intended target of the questionnaire is the recipient, not the obligor.
Here are some more selected quotes:
I could not find an equivalent questionnaire asking the non-custodial parent what they paid.
This is not, in any way, a trivial source of bias and needs to be kept in mind when you're using these statistics, but the Census Bureau does not disclose this as being a significant limitation of the data - despite the fact that they have used this methodology for a while and despite the fact that this census data has been used for decades to drum up huge social scares around deadbeat dads with no acknowledgement of the possible bias involved.
These caveats were outlined decades ago by Sanford Braver, who states in his book "Divorced dads: shattering the myths" that to answer these questions completely accurately, respondents would have to remember twelve to twenty-four different payments over the past year. In the absence of precise information, many if not most respondents will just try to make up a best estimate, which is a circumstance that allows for an incredible amount of bias to enter into one's results - even worse when you consider that many people are deeply angry at their exes. And if the census officials come to their conclusion based on reports by custodial parents that is going to hugely distort things, the effect being that the results will come with a built-in bias against non-custodial parents.
Braver conducts a study himself where he solves this problem by asking matched sets of custodial and non-custodial parents, and unsurprisingly, custodial parents (mostly mothers) report a much lower percentage of payments made than non-custodial parents (mostly fathers). 13% of mothers report receiving nothing despite being owed support, but only 4% of fathers report paying nothing despite being obligated. When looking at the overall payment statistic, divorced mothers report receiving between two-thirds and three-quarters of what they are owed, and fathers report paying better than 90 percent of what is owed. If we were to do what the Census Bureau did and interview the non-custodial parent only, child support nonpayment is barely even a problem at all!
He states, after this, "I am certainly not arguing that interviewing only fathers is what the Census Bureau ought to have done. I don't believe that noncustodial parents' reports should be uncritically accepted as truth, either. To me, it merely points out how erroneous the present practice of accepting the mother's report as truth without qualification is. When studying something as emotionally wrenching as divorce, it's nearly impossible for people to answer without bias. Indeed, both parents' reports are likely to be biased. In the absence of trustworthy objective official data to the contrary, it seems safest to assume that noncustodial parents are probably overstating child-support payments made, and custodial parents are probably understating. Thus, the truth lies somewhere in between, and our findings can best be thought of as "bracketing" true child-support compliance. In short, we must conclude that how much child support is not being paid remains in substantial dispute, but the amount being paid by divorced fathers is almost certainly higher than most official estimates. Deadbeat divorced dads are nowhere near as numerous as the stereotype portrays".
As to the divorced dads who don't pay, Braver notes that you can’t assume that this represents wilful noncompliance - the single biggest factor relating to nonpayment is typically unemployment and when you exclude fathers who experienced a period of unemployment from consideration, the compliance rate rises dramatically.
EDIT: a small correction
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That's true but I don't think phrases like "if he feels like it" and "complete and total command" are accurate. A better measure would include things like "how likely a woman is to be able to access her husband's money if he defects" because then improvements in that area would improve the gdi. As is, I still think it's important to bring up things like alimony because the original comment, and the measure itself, assume that alimony does not exist at all for anyone.
Yeah, there's also a question of who has the social power to use that money. A husband with tyrannical control over the finances is obviously worse (or at least more controlling) than one whose wife makes/helps make decisions with the money. This is probably more important than any other factor, and statistics seem to indicate it's actually biased towards women.
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I think the answer is ‘maybe, maybe not, but he can almost certainly get away with it for a while and it’s cold comfort to an Indian housewife who has to send her children to the sweatshops because of her husband’s gambling addiction that she’ll eventually start getting some portion of his checks’.
Sure, he can maybe get away with it for a while, but the point is that the standard assumes he can get away with it forever. In reality women truly do have practical, legal power over their husbands' salaries.
This is little more than a suggestion that the index would be more accurate if it discounted a woman's earned income somewhat in order to account for the possibility that a woman with no earned income might recover from her husband. A fine suggestion, but the index's failure to do (assuming it indeed fails to do so) hardly delegitimizes the entire endeavor.
You keep talking about how any problems with the index are just inaccuracies. I wonder if you'd accept that excuse for something on the other political side. "Yes, we're exaggerating the number of third trimester abortions, but that's just inaccurate". This kind of inaccuracy is deceptive. It's not excusable just because it's an inaccuracy that doesn't call the whole thing into question--at some point, inaccuracy does call the whole thing into question.
Again, the original claim was that the index is invalid simply because it is not perfect. That is a claim a failure to understand the nature of that which is being critiqued.
The claim is that the UN agency drawing up this index had already written the bottom line of "we don't want to say that Western countries are currently biased in favour of women", due to feminism, and chose what to correct and not correct (note the "women should live 5 years longer than men" thing mentioned above) such that all classic Western countries would come out below 1 (I checked; there are some classic Western countries extremely close to 1 but none above it).
"This agency is running a bottom-line-first algorithm" is a significantly-more-damning criticism than "this agency's index is not perfect". Ignoring a propagandist's numbers is not the ideal strategy, but it does better than taking them at face value (the ideal strategy is to pull apart how their numbers were derived, and derive better ones, but that's significantly harder). And if the agency is ideologically captured, it is not likely to improve its index in the future on metrics relevant to the bottom line, at least absent some effort to change its institutional incentives.
When you calculate the GDI using "equal lifespans is gender parity" instead of "women having 5 years longer lifespan is gender parity", I can confirm that a supermajority of countries listed as "very high human development" end up above 1 (i.e. women are favored), with the gaps comparable to the male-favorable ones in the current index.
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Yes, but the problem is that that is all it is: A claim, with no evidence.
And, it is hardly surprising that few countries are above 1. In how many countries does the average female income exceed that of men? (Note that that is an empirical question, not a normative one, and not a commentary on the causes of any differences).
All you do here is start with a vague premise "Western countries are currently biased in favour of women", then simply assume that every data point that you incorrectly believe* seems to refute that assumption must have been manipulated.
*The GDI is not a measure of bias, and it does not measure 90% of the types of things that make up the pro-female bias that is commonly complained of.
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The index's problems make it seriously misleading for its intended purpose.
You're trying to understate this.
Neither you nor I have any idea of the extent of its problems; I also suspect that you do not know what its intended purpose is.
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I think the index is broadly designed to advance certain goals, in particular goals to get women out of childrearing and into the workplace, at the expense of women. Rather than actually measure women's wellbeing, they choose to lump very ideological and unnatural goals such as "women should be in the workplace just as much as men, despite their different inclinations and reproductive schedules" in with much more broadly agreed-upon measures such as life expectancy. Obviously a difference in life expectancy should matter way more than how many women choose to enter the workforce, but the measure puts them on the same level.
One way to attack such behavior without being dismissed as a partisan crank is to highlight the differences between the activist organization's claimed goals and their actions. Things like power over household finances, likelihood of getting abused, and ability to survive/feed children after a divorce are far better indications of women's wellbeing, and men's societal treatment towards them, than any gender pay gap could be, since the latter is caused mainly by women's choices.
I grew up in a very conservative subculture. My sisters and female friends were still very embarrassed to admit they wanted to be stay at home mothers. Even in our subculture, women are heavily pressured to enter the workforce, so I'd argue that in some cases a narrowing gender pay gap is actually indicative of rising misogyny, at least if you define "pressuring women into making decisions they don't want to make" as misogyny.
It’s the UN. Decreasing fertility and economic growth through getting women into the workplace are explicit goals.
But I don’t see how that delegitimizes the whole index- it’s a measure and like all measures is somewhat imperfect. That the imperfections are there because of biases in the people that developed it is ultimately irrelevant; it’s the kind of measure that’s going to have a bias built in.
Agreed with the first half, though that's pretty much a non-sequitur because I never said its creators' biases were relevant anyways. The only thing that matters is the bias of the measure itself. Sure, maybe some kinds of measures have biases built in, but the extent to which they're biased still varies and matters quite a bit. You can't just lump all measures into either the "biased" category or the "unbiased" category.
Your first sentence:
Makes me think you're trying to reduce this down to just the two categories, "perfect" and "imperfect", or that you think I'm trying to do so. I'm not and never said anything of the sort. I am arguing that this measure is more imperfect than most people think, and that attitudes towards it should be updated accordingly.
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Why is it so obvious? To take an extreme example, the life expectancy of slaves in the US was probably higher than that of free whites in the Caribbean during the same time period, but I dare say that few would argue that slaves were better off. It certainly isn't obvious that they were. Re women, one can certainly argue, "your life sucks, but at least you live a long time," but it does not seem to me to be obvious that everyone must agree.
That might be true, but you are ignoring an important factor: It is difficult, if not impossible to quantify and accurately measure those things, especially across all the countries of the world. A metric that cannot be measured is less than useless.
The ability survive/feed children after a divorce is almost certainly one of the things that the earned income measurement is meant to proxy for, so this seems to be an argument in favor of the index.
I very much doubt slaves lived longer than free whites in the Caribbean. Regardless, though, I didn't even mention income, which your example implicitly compares. What I mentioned was workforce participation. If women were paid 50% of what men were paid for the same jobs, that would be an enormous problem. If women choose to participate in the workplace at 50% of the rate that men do, that's hardly a problem at all, but it's considered equivalent by the GDI.
Sure, one can argue that, but not me. That's nothing at all like what I'm arguing. It conflates happiness with income. What I'm arguing is more like "You earn only 99% of what men earn, but at least you live six years longer. I'd trade 1% of my income for an extra 6 years of life, wouldn't you?
The first two things are already measured across all countries. The third isn't really an objective measurement per se, but there are much better proxies available (I mean come on, just measure income post-divorce) than female earned income.
Workforce participation is a bad measure. The only reason to use it, rather than something better like "average wage of full-time workers", is if you are implicitly privileging the conclusion that men and women are identical, and women entering the workforce at greater rates is just as important as women living longer. Should a woman choose to stay out of the workforce and raise children instead, that's implicitly treated the same on the GDI as if she died at 25 while her male counterpart lived to 80.
I think you are underestimating how low life expectancy was in the Caribbean at the time
That is an entirely different point than the one I was responding to, which was that life expectancy is obviously more important than the other metrics in the index.
Why, if the issue is the degree to which women have income independent of the man in their life?
That is precisely my point: Life expectancy is NOT obviously more important, among other things because it depends on the relative levels of the various factors.
I notice that you seem to assume that we are talking about first-world countries. We are not. Do you think that "power over household finances" and "likelihood of getting abused" are measured in Burundi? In Myanmar? In Sri Lanka? I sincerely doubt that there is data on either of those in more than 20 countries in the world. Especially since "power" of any kind is difficult to measure objectively.
Again, how many countries measure that? How many have an incentive to measure it accurately? Not to mention that is ignores post-separation/abandonment/death income. Compare that with income per se, which all countries with an income tax have an incentive to measure. Which measure is more likely to be complete and accurate? Note that Wikipedia has data on divorce rates for only 105 countries and this UN document on divorce includes almost no African countries. And please don't argue that the UN data is from 10 years ago; a metric that only has recent accurate data is of limited utility, because knowing about change over time is important.
But, the GDI does not include a measure of workplace participation. It includes a measure of earned income.
And as for "and women entering the workforce at greater rates is just as important as women living longer," so what? I understand that you, personally, value longer life differently than they do (or, more accurately, than how you understand them to value them), but that does not, in itself, make their measure illegitimate or fraudulent. They are just measuring different things.
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That's not even how alimony works in the US, and I'd be very surprised if alimony worked in most low-index countries the same way it works in the US.
The only thing I said which could be reasonably seen as referring to alimony was when I said he's signed away his right to that money. That was in reference to "laws against that sort of thing, including alimony", not alimony alone. Child support is another big one. Laws preventing divorce are also big. Laws against spousal neglect, laws that you have to pay for your spouse's lawyer, etc. The list goes on.
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All such indexes are of course imperfect in many ways, but this particular criticism seems to me to be off the mark. According to the UN, the Gender Development Index is meant to measure "gender inequalities in achievement", not gender inequalities in economic well-being. In your hypothetical, the wife's* economic well-being* is as high or higher than that of her husband, but her economic achievement is indeed about zero. Moreover, "command over economic resources" would seem to imply something other than mere access to economic resources. A woman who relies on her husband as the breadwinner is dependent on him in ways that a woman who earns her own income is not. And, of course, female economic independence is correlated with all sorts of other outcomes of interest.* So, it certainly makes sense to measure it separately from total access to income via a husband.
Of course, maybe no one should care about any of this, but apparently the UN does.
*Note that the linked article refers to female labor force participation rate, rather than female earned income, as the GDI does. But earned income is probably much easier to reliably measure across countries than is labor force participation (most countries of course try to track income for purposes of taxation), so it is a reasonable, if imperfect, decision to use earned income as a proxy.
The commenters ignore this distinction the same way it will be ignored when these studies are brought forward to buttress social and political grievance.
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Equating achievement with salary is the manipulation. Mother raising a baby is not a failure because she is momentarily not earning salary. Our society does not measure achievement with a salary, why should the index?
I don't understand this sentence.
This is of course true, but it does not imply that her command over economic resources is zero. You ignore social norms and even laws that govern the sharing of economic resources in a marriage. By default, half of all wealth owned by the couple belongs to her. And as the marketers says, women make majority of purchasing decisions.
I don't think it implies otherwise. The index component is meant to measure "command over economic resources", not other forms of achievement.
Suppose there is one woman who has a minimum wage job, so she has earned income. Another woman is on welfare, with the same income, but of course it is all unearned. Their economic well-being is the same (as measured by purchasing power), but you rank them both the same on economic achievement? One is dependent on the state for her economic welfare, and the other is not. Perhaps "achievement" is not the most accurate term, but surely there is a separate phenomenon, and an important one, regarding which the two women vary.
Ok, so close to zero. Only if you define "command" as the ability to make decisions about purchases. But why would you do that? That is sufficiently measured by unearned income. And, why do you assume that "by default, half of all wealth owned by the couple belongs to her." That is not true in all US states, let alone in all countries. Nor is it necessarily true that women make the majority of purchasing decisions in every country.
Look, I am not saying that the index is perfect, but can you see why a reasonable person in the field of international development might find the index useful for many purposes?
You seem to keep changing the definition. Choose just one, economic achievement or command over economic resources? The GDI says it compares command over economic resources.
How else would you define "command"? Don't you think that you command many more resources that just your salary? Do you think retirees command zero economic resources because they no longer earn salary?
To be honest, I am from EU and it is true here so I assumed that it is true in the whole western developed world. Can you show me a concrete example to the contrary?
Useful for what purpose exactly? To me, the index seems as deliberately constructed to support certain ideology by very unreasonable people. As if they needed the index to show women are oppressed. But if you just used the dimensions from the HDI then it would show that men are much worse off. So they threw in the unadjusted pay gap but it was not enough, men were still worse off, so the threw in also the unadjusted employment gap, and finally, women are the worse off, even if the index does not make sense.
Look at it this way: if gender equality increases, what will the index show? Nordic countries are considered the most gender egalitarian. Married women have security and choices and they CHOOSE to stay with children and work more part-time jobs and less full time jobs. The index interprets it as women in Nordic countries being worse off.
I think perhaps you misconstrued my point; I meant to be saying exactly that: that economic achievement and command over economic resources are two different things. I said: " The index component is meant to measure "command over economic resources", not other forms of achievement" and "surely there is a separate phenomenon [ie, other than achievement], and an important one, regarding which the two women vary."
As the index does, as an ability to independently earn income. That is what it appears to be measuring, rather the ability to consume, which is what a measure of decisionmaking over purchases would measure.
I want to suggest that perhaps that belief is a function of your particular biases, rather than on actual evidence. it was apparently developed in order to address weaknesses in broader measures such as GDP or, specifically, the Human Development Index, which measure only country-level metrics and hence might miss problems at the subnational level. What is wrong with that? It is like when I was in my first year of teaching, and a colleague mentioned that our data on the achievement of our Asian students failed to reveal that certain subgroups, such as Mien kids, might be underperforming. And don't get me started on the differences in achievement between Mien males and females.
Such definition would determine that retirees have zero command over economic resources. Such definition would determine that MacKenzie Scott (Bezos) has zero command over economic resources. Which is obviously false, which in turn means that "independently earn income" can not be the measure of command over economic resources.
The index is meant to apply to all countries, not just outside of western developed world. The burden of being correct lies on with the index, not with me.
Sorry but this feels like strawman argument. We were clearly talking about division in a paid/unpaid labour that happens during the marriage.
I never said it is 50/50, I said it is not 0/100. I feel frustrated by what I perceive as you shifting the argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_property and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrimonial_regime. Again, the point is not that it is always a 50/50 split, the point is that it is almost never a 0/100.
We all have biases, including myself. But I think I have proven beyond reasonable doubt that GDI uses incorrect measure of "command over economic resources".
There is nothing wrong with that. Again, my argument never was that subnational level index is wrong.
Eh. Given that pension payments tend to be a function of past earned income, I would expect that including pensions in the index would do little to change the result.
And were there a country where MacKenzie Scotts made up a substantial part of the population, that might be a problem. Or would it? Surely the point is to get insight into the typical resident of the country.
You are misrembering. I was responding to your statement, "by default, half of all wealth owned by the couple belongs to her."
But, you said "wealth owned by the couple," not income. So, I responded with information about the division of property.
Then you would expect wrong. Women are recipients of majority of wealth transfers.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
Oh yes, I did say that. Sorry.
You are right. And thanks, you are teaching me to be more careful with what I say.
I am not really claiming to know why the index was created. My little speculation what just that, a speculation.
I helped me to make my argument stronger and I thankful for that. If you are interested I will be glad to continue this discussion but I am also content with agreeing to disagree.
But weren’t you talking specifically about pensions, not all transfers? I thought that was what your hypothetical was about.
Honestly, this is far more time than I expected to spend discussing the Gender Development Index; it isn't even a topic I am all that interested in, nor do I feel I have enough knowledge about the underlying process involved in developing the index to say much more than I have already said, so I would just as soon leave it here.
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The wife isn't literally doing nothing except eating, though. Housework is work that creates value; it's just assigned a misleading value of 0 here because it's not legible.
True, but she is not earning income. And doing unpaid labor does not seem to be a path toward economic independence.
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Good thought. The difference between income and spending can be staggering: https://girlpowermarketing.com/statistics-purchasing-power-women/
I'm not sure I believe these statistics - 93% of food, really? Do they literally eat money? But they make a point.
Also measuring knowledge by years of schooling is a hack. Measure literacy at least, or maybe scientific papers published in top journals. If you measure literacy, the US falls well below Russia or Ukraine, below Vietnam, to about the level of Zambia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate#List_of_UN_member_and_observer_states_by_adult_literacy_rate
But if you measure papers in top journals per capita, the US would perform very well. Metrics are what we make them to be.
Sure feels that way. My wife spends the money I earn while I work, so when vacationtime comes around I need to ask "what happened to my income"?
And it usually turns out that it all went into food.
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Good post.
First time I hear of this 'GDI'-.
Anything for the cause is my guess. Ostensibly, the cause is 'egalitarianism', but seeing as how things are going in the US, it's pretty clear 'egalitarianism' is just a label slapped on short-sighted ethnic and sex interests. Having a skewed index so your side is always going to look maligned is perfectly understandable.
The GDI is in opposition to the National Occupational Development (NOD) report.
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