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Londondare  I am new here  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5886 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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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.

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).

But, I am curious, what should the adjustment be for the genetic contribution to the gender difference in life expectancy?

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.

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.

  1. Again, your option of making no adjustment will also "penalize" countries, but different ones
  2. You are making unwarranted assumptions about how the index is used. The index is used, as a whole, not in parts, to compare with the HDI. The individual components are not necessarily used to assess anything, and certainly not the health care system, because it is meant to be a rough measure of inequality in general, including all of the factors which contribute to lifespan. More to the point, it is simply meant to assess the extent to which countrywide advances in human development, as measured by the HDI, are shared by members of both genders.

0 years.

Why would we do that, when we know it is incorrect?

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.

  1. No one has said otherwise.
  2. See my response to your other response.

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