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?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Thanks for running the numbers; I was too lazy to do it myself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Explaining a position is not the same as taking it*. In this particular case I'm not entirely convinced. Conspiracy to keep the Western numbers below 1 doesn't make a lot of sense since the numbers being barely below 1 is now but the metric hasn't AIUI been revised in decades (and indeed it's been partially superseded by the Gender Inequality Index). Also, the UN isn't fully a Western organisation, and non-Western countries would object to explicit fiddling to make women look worse off than they are. Don't get me wrong, the "women ought to live 5 years longer than men" thing does strike me as a bit of a double standard, but you don't need to be an explicit conspirator to run a double standard; you just need to have a mindset where it seems normal.
*Fine, whatever, I feel like kind of a prick now for not explicitly signposting this even though I didn't actually intend it as bait and it's not like I actually lied.
Well, it does seem that woman naturally live a big longer than men, all else being equal. Certainly life expectancy at birth tends to be lower for men, in part because of a greater propensity for risk-taking among young men and resulting higher rate of accidental death, and in part because of that pesky exposure to added risk from recessive genes because of the whole Y chromosome thing.
So, if you are looking at a country and trying to assess the effects of policy/society/culture/whatever, on life expectancy by gender, of course you are going to control for the natural tendency of women to live longer.
The GDI assumes a 5 year biological difference. But monks and nuns only have a 1 year difference; the top 1% in the USA have a 1.5 year difference; and plenty of entire countries (e.g. Iceland) have a 3 year difference. What's your justification for going with 5 years?
You're just stating "there's gender inequality in lifespan, so we need to correct for it in the index measuring gender inequality."
Why not do the same for, for instance, labor force participation? Take the global average labor force participation of each gender, state that it's natural, and then correct for it in the index, punishing those countries that have higher female labor force participation than average? Which is exactly what the index is doing for lifespan, except it punishes countries that are closer to equal lifespans relative to those where women outlive men by 5 years.
Bearing in mind that it was not I who came up with the number, I do see that the difference at the population level in the US (a giant, genetically diverse country, unlike Iceland, and hence not likely to be an outlier) has been about five years for decades, ever since the [risk of death in childbirth was reduced)(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3511335/) (and the ability of society to reduce things like mortality in childbirth is one of the reasons we care about "development" at all). And the fact that 5 years is the global a average adds to the inference that 5 is about right.
No, I am saying that there is a biological component to gender inequality in lifespan, so in order to determine the social/cultural/political component of lifespan differences, we need to control for the biological component. Isn’t that obvious?
Because we know that there is a biological basis for some of the differences in lifespan between genders, because we have an understanding of some of the biology that renders men more susceptible to certain pathologies. And, we have some idea of how big the difference is, as discussed above. In contrast, we don't know how much of the difference in labor force participation is biological, do we? And, how much does labor force participation deviate from the mean, compared to how much lifespan differences deviate?
So, the idea is that we know that the average globally is 5 years, and therefore it's impossible to get below 5 years, despite the fact that plenty of countries are below that average of 5 years?
To say nothing of other groups: the gap is strongly correlated with income. You can hypothesize mechanisms by which people with different biologies would self select into those groups, but neither you nor the UN have offered any evidence for that: you can't simply drop a speculation that there's an inherent immutable 5 year gap between men and women and hand wave away all the counterexamples to that.
I am not sure why you chose to omit the first part of my discussion, but regardless, no, that is not my understanding of the idea. My understanding is that the idea is to come up with the best estimate of the contribution to the genetic contribution to the difference, across all racial groups.
But, I am curious, what should the adjustment be for the genetic contribution to the gender difference in life expectancy?
It's perhaps plausible (though, as far as I can tell, unevidenced) that different racial groups have different biological lifespan gaps between the sexes. For the sake of argument, let's take that as a given. That still wouldn't justify the UN's approach here: it would be penalizing Iceland and other European countries for having a lower biological gap in life span than other countries. Why should the GDI take that smaller gap and massage it into a claim that the Icelandic health care system is more inequitable against women than countries with a larger gap? Pakistan manages to achieve a 4.8 year gap, and thus is considered by the GDI to have better health equity for women than Iceland, presumably thanks to its well-known dedication to and prioritization of women's well-being and health.
The GDI, as you'll point out, is an imperfect metric. But there's no reason to add an arbitrary fudge factor to make it more imperfect: adding that fudge factor doesn't make it any easier to analyze temporal trends or to do international comparisons, and it only serves to make primarily Western countries look more biased against women when someone looks at the top line numbers (which no one is supposed to do, but everyone does).
0 years. Biology, society, and personal choice are all intricately intertwined, and biological differences manifest differently depending on the social context. You point out that wealthier men have more resources to stave off the genetic differences in longevity, but that itself suggests that, if more resources were devoted to poorer men, that natural gender gap can be mitigated. Women have a higher genetic susceptibility to dying during childbirth than men do, but different social and policy choices can and should counteract that genetic difference; we should give that same grace to men. If men's shortened longevity is due to greater vulnerability to exposure to disease, toxins, and just wear and tear on the body than women (or, indeed, due to lower risk aversion), society should make policy choices to increase men's longevity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The issue is that there are several ways to slice things.
There's the "we care about the gap and only the gap" way. There's also the "we only care about gaps due to unequal treatment" way.
The vast majority of the earned-income gap between men and women in the modern West is due to men's and women's life choices differing (some due to biology, some due to culture, although I'd note here that there are social pressures on both sexes and the intense pressure on men to not be househusbands is not exactly culture being nice to them). There are some cases of straight biological inability (no woman can decide to be the best tennis player in the world, not because she's banned from it but because testosterone and narrow hips are a large advantage) and the occasional case of actual discrimination, but the vast majority is choices.
The vast majority of the lifespan gap between men and women in the modern West is due to either choices or straight biology, as you note (do note that if you go outside the modern West there are things like sex-selective conscription to consider; there are of course reasons for conscription to be sex-selective but it's still definitely an unequal imposition by society).
Correcting for both or neither is highly-defensible. Correcting for one and not the other is, well, a double standard*. Hence me calling it a double standard. As I said, though, I don't think this is some grand conspiracy; it's easy to miss a double standard if you're not looking and nobody's looking who matters.
*I can see an argument for correcting for choices but not for biology; one argument that I really wish I heard ever from either side of the aisle is "Native Americans/Aboriginal Australians' shitty health outcomes are to a large extent biological rather than imposed by discrimination - their ancestors were not selected for disease resistance to the extent Old Worlders were - but while this is not exactly society's fault it's hardly their own fault either and doesn't mean we shouldn't put effort into improving them". Obvious substitution for this issue is obvious, but that gets us in the exact opposite corner from the GDI's calculation.
But, how can one even measure differences in life choices, especially in countries that are not highly developed (ie, most of them)? (And, since this is a development index, those who created it are mostly concerned with less-developed countries. Where btw differences btw male and female earnings are less likely to be due to preferences).
It seems to me that we have an index with three components, at least two of which are confounded (lifespan by biology, and income by preferences). The former can easily be adjusted for (albeit imperfectly, as is always the case), while the other cannot easily be adjusted for. Why would you refrain from adjusting the one that you can adjust for? Isn't an index with one confounded measure likely to be more accurate than one with two confounded measures?
But you can easily adjust for income: speculate about the average difference in income that's "natural" and adjust for it. Which is exactly what is done for lifespan. It might be flawed, but as you point out repeatedly the index is full of flaws and can still be useful. Why do it for one and not the other?
I don't understand how you would do that. The lifespan adjustment is not speculative. We know that there is a biological basis for some of the differences in lifespan between genders, because we have an understanding of some of the biology that renders men more susceptible to certain patologies. And, we have some idea of how big the difference is; for example, it seems to have been about 5 years in the US for decades, ever since the risk of death from childbirth was substantially decreased (and, of course, the ability of a society to reduce the risk of death from childbirth is precisely the type of thing that is meant by "development").
In contrast, income differences afaik have not reached a steady state for decades. So, again, how do we know how much to adjust for? There might be a way, but it is not obvious to me what it is.
You are flying EXTREMELY close to the sun here. If we're going to be correcting for the difference in lifespan due to biological factors, shouldn't we also be correcting for the difference in income and command over economic resources? We know the biological basis for the difference (women are physically weaker and generally less competitive in terms of personality) so why not correct for it?
More options
Context Copy link
And what of the ability of society to reduce the risk from male-specific pathologies? Pregnancy is, of course, even more absolute and immutable than any other biological differences men have, and yet we can (and should!) penalize countries that have a high mother mortality during childbirth, not correct it out of the statistics by omitting women who die during childbirth from calculations of female lifespan.
As I mention elsewhere, people in the top 1% in the US have a gap of 1.5 years. Entire countries have a gap of 3 years. And gender-based discrimination hasn't been eliminated in any of those groups.
In fact, the income gap in the US has been stable for at least two decades. See https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-enduring-grip-of-the-gender-pay-gap/. So, if we really want to go with stable differences as the measure for natural state of the world, we should assume a ~20% pay gap as parity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And policy choices. For instance, during COVID, the three biggest risk factors for mortality were age, certain preexisting conditions, and being male. In the US, only two of those were considered worth prioritizing when it came to vaccine access. Moreover, race was added as one over being male, so a 20 year old black woman received priority over a 50 year old white male, despite being at far less risk of severe illness.
COVID-induced mortality among older men, I would point out, was the primary factor in lifespan decreasing for the past couple years in the USA.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link