How UN manipulates the Gender Development Index to hide uncomfortable truth
One has to ask: Is this just UN's incompetence or a malice?
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).
Human development
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:
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI
So far so good. Next, the Gender Development Index (GDI) is simply defined as a ratio of female to male HDI values. 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.
Source: https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/hdr2021-22pdf_1.pdf
Smoke and mirrors
Wait, what? What does it mean that females in UK have standard of living like Estonia (GNI Estonia=38,048) while males in UK have standard of living like Germany (GNI Germany=54,534)?
The UNDP calculates separate standards of living 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
According to this index, males in Mauritania enjoy the standard of living of Viet Nam (GNI Viet Nam=7,867) while females in Mauritania suffer the standard of living of Haiti (GNI Haiti=2,847).
Let's be honest here: this is total bullshit. There are two problems with using the raw employment gap and the raw wage gap for calculating the standard of living.
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 husband from India spends years in Qatar labouring 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.
2) Governments redistribute wealth
This is a no brainer too. One's standard of living is not equal to ones pay check. There are social programs, pensions, public infrastructure. Even if you have never received a pay check yourself, you can take a public transport on a public road to a public hospital. Judging by the Tax Freedom Day, states around the world redistribute from 30% to 50% of all income. 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 pensions of the 5-times more prosperous Algeria.
Systemic Sexism
Don't get me wrong, the employment gap and pay gap are not irrelevant for the standard of living and human development. Pensions and social security schemes often do not respect the shared family income and as a result wives often end up with lower pensions. The non-working partner is also severely disadvantaged in case of divorce. But to pretend these gaps define 100% of the standard of living is simply a lie. One has to ask: Is this just UN's incompetence or a malice?
Wikipedia quotes this information:
For most countries, the earned-income gap accounts for more than 90% of the gender penalty.
Why is it important? Because when we look at the other three indices it becomes clear, that without the manipulation, the index would show something very controversial: in majority of countries, males are the less developed gender. At least according to UN's own definition of Human Development Index.