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Londondare  I am new here  7mo ago (text post)   Edited 7mo ago   4682 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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But he could still decide to stop doing that at literally any moment.

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.

the standard assumes he can get away with it forever.

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.

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.

You keep talking about how any problems with the index are just inaccuracies. I wonder if you'd accept that excuse for something on the other political side. "Yes, we're exaggerating the number of third trimester abortions, but that's just inaccurate". This kind of inaccuracy is deceptive. It's not excusable just because it's an inaccuracy that doesn't call the whole thing into question--at some point, inaccuracy does call the whole thing into question.

  1. I don't know why you think there are "sides" on this particular issue. But this is pretty rich, since it sure seems that most of the objections seem to be that commenters fear that it says something that commenters don't want to hear.
  2. The problem with your analogy to abortion numbers is that false numbers are just that: false. And true numbers are true. In contrast, as I have repeatedly noted, an index like this one is inherently less than perfectly accurate, And, an index, unlike an abortion statistic, can not be said to be either "false" or "true." So, it is not enough to say, as people have, that it is not perfectly accurate. It might be so inaccurate that is "call[s] the whole thing in question," but neither you nor I nor anyone else here has any idea how "inaccurate" it is (ie, the degree to which it does not reflect what is actually happening on the ground). None of us even knows the precise methodology used. The only one who has posted any description of the methodology is yours truly.

Again, the original claim was that the index is invalid simply because it is not perfect. That is a claim a failure to understand the nature of that which is being critiqued.

The claim is that the UN agency drawing up this index had already written the bottom line of "we don't want to say that Western countries are currently biased in favour of women", due to feminism, and chose what to correct and not correct (note the "women should live 5 years longer than men" thing mentioned above) such that all classic Western countries would come out below 1 (I checked; there are some classic Western countries extremely close to 1 but none above it).

"This agency is running a bottom-line-first algorithm" is a significantly-more-damning criticism than "this agency's index is not perfect". Ignoring a propagandist's numbers is not the ideal strategy, but it does better than taking them at face value (the ideal strategy is to pull apart how their numbers were derived, and derive better ones, but that's significantly harder). And if the agency is ideologically captured, it is not likely to improve its index in the future on metrics relevant to the bottom line, at least absent some effort to change its institutional incentives.

Yes, but the problem is that that is all it is: A claim, with no evidence.

And, it is hardly surprising that few countries are above 1. In how many countries does the average female income exceed that of men? (Note that that is an empirical question, not a normative one, and not a commentary on the causes of any differences).

All you do here is start with a vague premise "Western countries are currently biased in favour of women", then simply assume that every data point that you incorrectly believe* seems to refute that assumption must have been manipulated.

*The GDI is not a measure of bias, and it does not measure 90% of the types of things that make up the pro-female bias that is commonly complained of.

you

Explaining a position is not the same as taking it*. In this particular case I'm not entirely convinced. Conspiracy to keep the Western numbers below 1 doesn't make a lot of sense since the numbers being barely below 1 is now but the metric hasn't AIUI been revised in decades (and indeed it's been partially superseded by the Gender Inequality Index). Also, the UN isn't fully a Western organisation, and non-Western countries would object to explicit fiddling to make women look worse off than they are. Don't get me wrong, the "women ought to live 5 years longer than men" thing does strike me as a bit of a double standard, but you don't need to be an explicit conspirator to run a double standard; you just need to have a mindset where it seems normal.

*Fine, whatever, I feel like kind of a prick now for not explicitly signposting this even though I didn't actually intend it as bait and it's not like I actually lied.

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