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Londondare  I am new here  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5925 thread views

How UN manipulates the Gender Development Index

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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The idex measures averages, not worst case scenarios.

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:

  1. A single woman working retail part-time making minimum wage (say, $10k/year)

  2. 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:

  1. A single American woman with an engineering degree who earns 100k
  2. A single Afghan woman with an engineering degree who used to earn 100k (purchasing power parity), but after the Taliban takeover cannot work at all so marries a guy who earns 100k.

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).

And, let me give you a hypothetical:

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".

  1. Once again, you are assuming that the index is not at all trying to measure economic independence.
  2. Given the challenges inherent in obtaining accurate data, are you not open to the possibility that an index that made the adjustments you suggest would actually be a less reliable measure of what it purports to represent?

Given the challenges inherent in obtaining accurate data, are you not open to the possibility that an index that made the adjustments you suggest would actually be a less reliable measure of what it purports to represent?

The "adjustment" I suggest is "don't use zero", so this question doesn't make sense.

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

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

Yes, it would be difficult to get that data from very many countries

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,

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."

The woman who relies on her husband indeed has less control, on average, than a woman who earns her own income.

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.

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.

  1. 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."

  2. 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.

This is an argument that the index is imperfect.

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.

1 Sorry.

2

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

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.

Adding incomplete or poorly measured adjustments like the one you suggest might well make the index worse at reflecting reality.

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?

Sorry

NP

Consider the case of Nordic countries

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.

: 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?

  1. I am not sure that it is true that it is using non-adjusted employment gap and non-adjusted wage gap. Consider this;

Nevertheless, estimates of average male and female per capita GDP are included in the GDI. The restricted availability of sex-disaggregated income data leads the UNDP to use female and male shares of earned income to indicate gender disparities in the standard of living. The female (or male) income share is computed by multiplying the ratio of the female (male) wage to the average wage by the female (or male) share of the economically active population.7 Multiplying the HDI figure for average GDP per capita by the harmonic mean of the male and female income shares adjusts the HDI (downwards, as the male income share is largest for all countries) so that it reflects gender disparities in earned income.8

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.

  1. I am sure that the data is, to some degree, incomplete or poorly measured. But, the question is, to what degree? As I noted, the data on income is a lot more complete and probably better measured than data on divorce, let alone income after divorce, etc.

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.

No matter how an index that covers every country in the world is constructed, it is going to miss nuances somewhere.

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 am not sure that it is true that

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.

I am sure that the data is, to some degree, incomplete or poorly measured. But, the question is, to what degree?

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.

Following your statement that "change in the index is likely to correspond with actual changes on the ground", the answer is: not necessarily.

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.

And I think I proved beyond reasonable doubt that "command over economic resources" can not be measured by salary.

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.

How is this different from your link? I don't see it.

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.

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.

  1. This assumes that the GDI is purely meant to measure the ability to consume, which I am not sure is the case.
  2. Even if it is, as Wikipedia notes, "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." The HDI includes per capita income, and apparently the GDI in part is trying to figure out how that varies by gender. Most income worldwide is earned, and even if a large pct of wealth is redistributed by the state in some countries,* how much does including improve rhe index's likelihood of reflecting real conditions on the ground?

*and the norm, even among rich countries, is twenty percent, tops

whether it does so is the correct metric to use in judging it.

Correlation is not the only criterion. Amplitude matters too.

Whether that is the same as what you understand them to be trying to measure is a different question.

I am not making my own assumptions, I quoted UNJDP on what they say they measure.

Meaning that neither of us know much about their precise methodology.

I disagree. I read their methodological paper, I am even quoting it in my post.

This assumes

Again, I am not assuming anything, UNDP clearly says what the economic dimension means.

as Wikipedia notes

Wikipedia is not a source, what is the actual source of that claim?

Correlation is not the only criterion. Amplitude matters too

But when looking at whether a change in an index corresponds with actual changes on the ground, amplitude is included. Eg, does a 5 pct increase in an index correspond with a 5 pct increase in what it purports to measure, or a 2 pct increase, or a 3 pct decrease, or what?

Again, I am not assuming anything, UNDP clearly says what the economic dimension means.

I was referring to the question of what "command" means.

Wikipedia is not a source, what is the actual source of that claim

It is indeed a source, as are all secondary sources. How reliable it or other secondary sources are is a different question. I believe there is a citation in the Wikipedia article.

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