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Gender-Related Indicators: Issues for Advocacy, Policy, and Research

Stephan Klasen

University of Göttingen

Germany

OECD Workshop

May 24, 2007

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Three Uses of Gender-Indicators

• National and international advocacy regarding gender issues– Simple and transparent– Comparable across space and time– Powerful advocacy messages

• Guide to policy-makers regarding priority gender issues– Disaggregated and comprehensive– Covering actionable policy areas– Useful for direct monitoring purposes

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Three Uses

• Gender data for Research on Gender Issues– Need underlying causal variables– Long time series useful– Data quality issues quite crucial– Comparability across space and time

important;

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Advocacy Indicators• UNDP‘s Gender-Related Measures currently don‘t fulfill

this function:– GDI often misinterpreted as gender gap measure, problems with

earned income component, hard to interpret, highly intransparent;

– GEM also too complex and dependence on income levels (rather than gender gaps in incomes)

– Currently implementing alternatives based on review process in 2006 (see Journal of Human Development 2006);

• Other measures (e.g. WEF Gender Gap Index, Africa Gender Index, or Social Watch Index) useful but also generally too complex and rather intransparent;

• Conceptual problems:– Compensation versus Cumulation;– Ratio of Rates versus Female Shares;– Averaging of Ratios (arithmetic versus geometric means)– Weigthing Procedures

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Proposals to Revise GDI-GEM• GDI: to be replaced with geometric mean of

three component gender ratios (life expectancy, education, and labour force participation);

• GEM: Use income shares rather than income levels and also use geometric mean of female-male ratios of three components;

• Create separately distribution-sensitive well-being measures (including gender inequality as one distributional issue);

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Gender Indicators for Policy• Considerable success of MDG3 indicator;• Needed: actionable gender disaggregated

measures;• Problem: Many areas simply no data

– Distribution of resources within households;– Gender distribution of wealth within households;– Gender-disaggregated input into agricultural

production and small enterprises – Gender-based violence– No internationally (or inter-temporally) comparable

data on female labour force participation, unemployment, or wages

• Sometimes available but not used;

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Gender Data for Research

• Need data that help develop causal models of gender inequality (across space and time);

• OECD database a very useful starting point (but no time series!);

• Need to take historical evolution of gender-based institutions much more seriously (and try to find quantitative measures for it);

• Comparable data on gender-disaggregated economic data would surely help !

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Conclusion

• A modest proposal:– Let‘s fix the advocacy problem once and for all with a

simple transparent gender gap measure;– Focus our attention on gender gender-disaggregated

data in actionable policy arenas;– Try to get time series of internationally comparable

economic data by gender– Work on ways to measure and explain historical

evolution of institutions of equity or inequity.