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Londondare  I am new here  7mo ago (text post)   Edited 7mo ago   4871 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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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.

It is very nice of him to send money home to his wife and family. It is a good thing for women in his homeland if most men choose to do this.

But he could still decide to stop doing that at literally any moment. If his wife displeases him, if he meets someone else there, if he runs into trouble and needs the money for himself, if he acquires a drug or gambling problem, or just if he feels like it.

Yes, he has complete and total command over those economic resources.

That he chooses to spend them on his wife is nice for her, but it doesn't change who commands them.

This is not a distinction without a difference. being dependent on someone else for your ability to survive is essentially and massively different from being self-sufficient. And when an entire class of people is in that dependent position, it changes how society conceives of and treats those people, how they conceive of and treat themselves.

This is very much the type of thing the index is meant to measure.

But he could still decide to stop doing that at literally any moment.

So could anyone else. If a woman is employed, her employer could fire her. If she works in a store the government could zone the area and make it illegal to operate the store.

There's a difference between a not 100% certain source of income and no income. Counting the former as the latter is lying with figures.

But if I am a woman who depends on my husband for income, all those things could happen re my husband's job. So, aren't I doubly dependent, relative to a woman who earns her own income? Seems like a meaningful distinction to me.

Is it a meaningful enough distinction to send your daughter to live in Qatar?

As I understand it, the GDI is not neant to be used for that purpose. Per Wikipedia, "The GDI cannot be used independently from the HDI score, and so, it cannot be used on its own as an indicator of gender gaps. Only the gap between the HDI and the GDI can actually be accurately considered; the GDI on its own is not an independent measure of gender gaps."

Sure. Come up with some factor to take this account, justify it as best you can, and multiply by it.

However, this factor won't be zero.

What does it mean to earn your own income? If your customers are mostly men, are you earning your own income? After all, the men could choose to stop patronizing your business at any moment. That's not much different from the husband who could stop sending remittances at any moment.

Yes, that's why financial advisors always say that putting all of your money in one stock is exactly as safe as buying index funds.

They say that putting your money in one stock is risky, but they don't say that putting money into one stock is so risky that the stock counts as having zero income when making income comparisons.

I agree, being supported by your husband is somewhere in between as secure as 'having no money whatsoever' and 'earning your own money'.

But that's not a problem with the scale, it's just what the scale is actually measuring.

Every scale with a problem is measuring something. If the scale accidentally divided female lifespan by two, you could say "it still measures something, it measures whether female lifespan divided by two is less than male lifespan. It's just that that measure isn't very useful".

Ok.

That's not actually an argument against the thing the scale is measuring, which I've spent a bunch of comments discussing already.

I don't think anyone is confused into thinking that in the countries with a low index 100% of women starve to death because they have no income and thus no access to resources from any source.

Countries like that don't and haven't existed, so it would be a weird thing to put this much effort into measuring.

What has and does exist is countries where women are dependent on men for resources, and thus have less power and self-determination.

That's a thing that makes sense to measure since it varies a lot between cultures, and it sure seems to be what this index is measuring.

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