The Gender Inequality Index- The Inequality In The Achievements Of Men And Women

Gender inequality has been ongoing in society and has been acknowledged as one of the more significant barriers to achieving human development. As a result, measures such as the gender-related development index (GDI) and the gender empowerment measure (GEM) were developed and have formed part of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP's) Human Development Report (HDR) starting in 1998.

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Defnition

The gender inequality index (GII) is a composite measure that reflects the inequality in the achievements of men and women in reproductive health, political empowerment, and the labour market.

The GII reflects gender disadvantage across three dimensions - reproductive health, empowerment and the labor market - for as many countries as reasonably-quality data permit. It shows the loss of potential human development due to inequalities between women's and men's achievements in these dimensions. It ranges from 0, where men and women perform equally, to 1, where one sex performs as worst as possible on all dimensions measured.

The gender-related development index (GDI) measures the inequalities between males and females relating to life expectancy at birth, education, and control of economic resources.

The gender empowerment measure (GEM) measures the differences between males and females regarding political participation, economic participation, and control over economic resources

Barriers

One of the biggest problems is structural inequalities in education and work. This includes concentration of women or men in specific fields of science or professions. Despite efforts to address the problem, such as special initiatives to encourage women to study science, engineering and ICT education, inequalities have continued to increase since 2010. There is a lack of men in the care sector. They constitute only 15% of people in professions such as nursing, midwifery or widely understood health care.

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Gender inequality index calculation

The GII has 3 dimensions- reproductive health, political empowerment, and labour market.

• The labour market participation rate (LFPR) for men and women over 15 years of age is calculated by the following equation. This dimension ignores unpaid work done by women, e.g. in the household.

M= Male F= Female

• Political empowerment is found by looking at the share of parliamentary seats held by men and women (PR) and the ratio of women and men aged 25 and over who have achieved a secondary or higher education (SE) using the equation below.

M= Male F= Female

Finding the gender inequality index

After the individual dimensions have been calculated, the GII is found using the four steps below.

• Step 1

Aggregate across the dimensions for each gender group using the geometric mean.

M= Male

F= Female

G= Geometric mean

• Step 2

Aggregate across gender groups using the harmonic mean. This shows inequalities and allows for a relationship among the dimensions.

M= Male

F= Female

G= Geometric mean

• Step 3

Calculate the geometric mean of the arithmetic mean for each dimension.

M= Male

F= Female

G= Geometric mean

• Step 4

Calculate the GII.

M= Male

F= Female

G= Geometric mean

Source: hdr.undp.org