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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Notes -
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.
Could he? Most countries have laws against that sort of thing, including alimony. Once they are married, he has literally signed away at least half of his own right to that money.
I think the answer is ‘maybe, maybe not, but he can almost certainly get away with it for a while and it’s cold comfort to an Indian housewife who has to send her children to the sweatshops because of her husband’s gambling addiction that she’ll eventually start getting some portion of his checks’.
Sure, he can maybe get away with it for a while, but the point is that the standard assumes he can get away with it forever. In reality women truly do have practical, legal power over their husbands' salaries.
This is little more than a suggestion that the index would be more accurate if it discounted a woman's earned income somewhat in order to account for the possibility that a woman with no earned income might recover from her husband. A fine suggestion, but the index's failure to do (assuming it indeed fails to do so) hardly delegitimizes the entire endeavor.
I think the index is broadly designed to advance certain goals, in particular goals to get women out of childrearing and into the workplace, at the expense of women. Rather than actually measure women's wellbeing, they choose to lump very ideological and unnatural goals such as "women should be in the workplace just as much as men, despite their different inclinations and reproductive schedules" in with much more broadly agreed-upon measures such as life expectancy. Obviously a difference in life expectancy should matter way more than how many women choose to enter the workforce, but the measure puts them on the same level.
One way to attack such behavior without being dismissed as a partisan crank is to highlight the differences between the activist organization's claimed goals and their actions. Things like power over household finances, likelihood of getting abused, and ability to survive/feed children after a divorce are far better indications of women's wellbeing, and men's societal treatment towards them, than any gender pay gap could be, since the latter is caused mainly by women's choices.
I grew up in a very conservative subculture. My sisters and female friends were still very embarrassed to admit they wanted to be stay at home mothers. Even in our subculture, women are heavily pressured to enter the workforce, so I'd argue that in some cases a narrowing gender pay gap is actually indicative of rising misogyny, at least if you define "pressuring women into making decisions they don't want to make" as misogyny.
It’s the UN. Decreasing fertility and economic growth through getting women into the workplace are explicit goals.
But I don’t see how that delegitimizes the whole index- it’s a measure and like all measures is somewhat imperfect. That the imperfections are there because of biases in the people that developed it is ultimately irrelevant; it’s the kind of measure that’s going to have a bias built in.
Agreed with the first half, though that's pretty much a non-sequitur because I never said its creators' biases were relevant anyways. The only thing that matters is the bias of the measure itself. Sure, maybe some kinds of measures have biases built in, but the extent to which they're biased still varies and matters quite a bit. You can't just lump all measures into either the "biased" category or the "unbiased" category.
Your first sentence:
Makes me think you're trying to reduce this down to just the two categories, "perfect" and "imperfect", or that you think I'm trying to do so. I'm not and never said anything of the sort. I am arguing that this measure is more imperfect than most people think, and that attitudes towards it should be updated accordingly.
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