Gender Inequality Index (GII)
The disadvantages facing women
and girls are a major source of inequality. All too often, women and girls are
discriminated against in health, education and the labour market — with
negative repercussions for their freedoms. We introduce a new measure of these
inequalities built on the same framework as the HDI and the IHDI — to better expose differences
in the distribution of achievements between women and men.
Gender inequality varies
tremendously across countries—the losses in achievement due to gender
inequality (not directly comparable to total inequality losses because
different variables are used) range from 4.5 percent to 74.7 percent.
Countries with unequal
distribution of human development also experience high inequality between women
and men, and countries with high gender inequality also experience unequal
distribution of human development. To learn more: HDR 2013 Technical Notes English
[153 KB]
Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQs) about the Gender Inequality Index (GII)
WUNRN Note: Click on
website link, scroll to the questions, and click on arrow beside each for
answers:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/gii/
What
is the Gender Inequality Index?
The Gender Inequality Index (GII) reflects
women’s disadvantage in three dimensions—reproductive health, empowerment and
the labour market—for as many countries as data of reasonable quality allow.
The index shows the loss in human development due to inequality between female
and male achievements in these dimensions. It ranges from 0, which indicates
that women and men fare equally, to 1, which indicates that women fare as
poorly as possible in all measured dimensions. The health dimension is measured
by two indicators: maternal mortality ratio and the adolescent fertility rate.
The empowerment dimension is also measured by two indicators: the share of
parliamentary seats held by each sex and by secondary and higher education
attainment levels. The labour dimension is measured by women’s participation in
the work force. The Gender Inequality Index is designed to reveal the extent to
which national achievements in these aspects of human development are eroded by
gender inequality, and to provide empirical foundations for policy analysis and
advocacy efforts.
- How is the GII
calculated, and what are its main findings in terms of national and
regional patterns of inequality?
There
is no country with perfect gender equality – hence all countries suffer some
loss in their HDI achievement when gender inequality is taken into account,
through use of the GII metric. The Gender Inequality Index is similar in method
to the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). It can be
interpreted as a percentage loss to potential human development due to
shortfalls in the dimensions included. Since the Gender Inequality Index
includes different dimensions than the HDI, it cannot be interpreted as a loss
in HDI itself. Unlike the HDI, higher GII values indicate lower achievement.
The
world average score on the GII is 0.463, reflecting a percentage loss in
achievement across the three dimensions due to gender
inequality of 46.3%. Regional averages range from 28.0% in Europe and Central
Asia, to nearly 58% in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the country level losses due to
gender inequality range from 4.5% in the Netherlands, to 74.7% in Yemen.
Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Arab States suffer the largest losses
due to gender inequality (57.7%, 56.8% and 55.5% respectively).
- What are the
limitations of the Gender Inequality Index?
The Gender Inequality Index faces major data limitations, which constrains
the choice of indicators. For example, we use national parliamentary
representation that excludes participation at the local government level and
elsewhere in community and public life. The labour market dimension lacks
information on incomes, employment and on unpaid work mostly done by women. The
Index misses other important dimensions, such as time use – the fact that many
women have the additional burden of care giving and housekeeping, which cut
into leisure time and increase stress and physical exhaustion. Asset ownership,
gender-based violence and participation in community decision-making are also
not captured, mainly due to limited data availability.
- What are the sources
of data used for calculating the Gender Inequality Index?
The Gender Inequality Index relies on data from major publicly available
databases, including the maternal mortality ratio from the United Nations
Maternal Mortality Estimation Group (MMEIG), the WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and the
World Bank; adolescent fertility rates from the UN Department of Economic and
Social Affair’s World Population Prospects; educational attainment statistics
from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics educational attainment tables and the
Barro-Lee data sets; parliamentary representation from the International
Parliamentary Union; and labour market participation from the International
Labour Organization’s Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM) 7th
Edition.
- What is the rationale
for using indicators for health without equivalents for men?
It is true that reproductive health indicators used in the Gender
Inequality Index do not have equivalent indicators for men. So in this dimension,
the reproductive health of girls and women is compared to what should be
societal goals—no maternal death, and no adolescent pregnancy. The rationale is
that safe motherhood reflects the importance society attaches to women’s
reproductive role. Early childbearing, as measured by the adolescent fertility
rate, is associated with greater health risks for mothers and infants; also,
adolescent mothers often are forced out of school and into low-skilled jobs.
- What do you do in
situations where female parliamentary representation is zero?
Only 3 out of 148 countries included in the GII have female shares of
parliamentary seats equal to zero. We replaced the zero value with 0.1% to make
the computation possible. The rationale is that while women may not be represented
in parliament, they do have some political influence. The relative rank of
these countries is sensitive to the choice of the replacement value. The lowest
observed non-zero female parliamentary representation was 0.7% for Yemen.
- Was there any change
in 2013 in the calculation of the GII?
No,
there has been no change in calculation. As in 2011, maternal mortality ratio
enters the Gender Inequality Index truncated at 10 which affects the range of Gender
Inequality Index values which theoretically should be between 0 and 1. This is
corrected by normalizing the maternal mortality ratio by 10. This intervention
generally reduced the values of the Gender Inequality Index. To facilitate the
comparison a trend of the Gender Inequality Index based on consistent time
series data has been calculated.
- Why has the Gender
Inequality Index replaced the Gender Development Index and Gender
Empowerment Measure used in previous Reports?
The
introduction in 1995 of the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the
Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) coincided with growing international
recognition of the importance of monitoring progress in the elimination of
gender gaps in all aspects of life. While the GDI and the GEM have contributed
immensely to the gender debate, they have conceptual and methodological
limitations. The Gender Inequality Index was introduced as an experimental
index in 2010 as part of the 20th anniversary edition of the Human
Development Report. Just as the HDI continues to evolve, the Gender Inequality
Index will also evolve as and when data becomes available.
The GDI
was not a measure of gender inequality: it was the HDI adjusted for gender
disparities in its basic components and cannot be interpreted independently of
the HDI. The difference between the HDI and the GDI appears to be small because
the differences captured in the three dimensions tend to be small, giving a
misleading impression that gender gaps are irrelevant. In addition, gender-disaggregated
incomes have to be estimated in a very crude way using not so realistic
assumptions due to the lack of income data by gender for over three-fourths of
countries.
Both
the GDI and GEM combined relative and absolute achievements. The earned income
component uses both—the income level and the gender-disaggregated income
shares. However, income levels tend to dominate the indices, and as a result,
countries with low income levels cannot achieve a high score even with perfect
gender equality in the distribution of earnings and other components of the
indices. Nearly all of the GEM indicators reflect an elite bias, making the
measure more relevant for developed countries and urban areas in developing
countries.
The Gender Inequality Index introduces methodological improvements and
alternative indicators. It measures inequality between genders in three
dimensions, with carefully chosen indicators to reflect women’s reproductive
health status, their empowerment and labour market participation relative to men’s.
The Gender Inequality Index combines elements of the GDI and the GEM. Income,
the most controversial component of the GDI and GEM, is not a component of the
Gender Inequality Index. Moreover, the new Index does not allow high
achievement in one dimension to compensate for low achievement in another
dimension.
- How is the GII
different from other recently released Gender indices?
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (GGI), released on
November 1, 2011, differs from the Human Development Report’s GII in many ways.
First, the dimensions and indicators are different. Second, the GGI measures
gender gaps without taking into consideration a country’s level of development.
In contrast, the GII shows the loss to potential achievement in a country due
to gender inequality across reproductive health, empowerment and labour market
participation. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Women’s Economic Opportunity
Index (WEOI) is also different in that it focusses on laws and regulations
about women’s participation in the labour market and social institutions that
affect women’s economic participation. It has five dimensions – labour policies
and practice, women’s economic opportunity, access to finance, education and
training, women’s legal and social status, and general business environment.
Each category or sub-category has four to five indicators. Like the OECD’s
Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), the WEOI complements the GII by
helping us understand the underlying causes of gender inequalities in economic
participation.
- What is the policy
relevance of the Gender Inequality Index?