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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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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."

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