Trends In Gender Equality And Women’s Advancement
WP/16/21Trends in Gender Equality and Women’s Advancementby Janet G. Stotsky, Sakina Shibuya, Lisa Kolovich, and Suhaib Kebhaj
2016 International Monetary FundWP/16/21IMF Working PaperResearch Department and Strategy, Policy, and Review DepartmentTrends in Gender Equality and Women’s Advancement*Prepared by Janet G. Stotsky, Sakina Shibuya, Lisa Kolovich, and Suhaib KebhajAuthorized for distribution by Prakash Loungani and Catherine PattilloFebruary 2016IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the authors and are published toelicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers arethose of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board,or IMF management.AbstractThis paper examines trends in indicators of gender equality and women’s development, usingevidence derived from individual indicators and gender equality indices. We extend both theUnited Nations Development Program’s Gender Development Index and Gender InequalityIndex to examine time trends. In recent decades, the world has moved closer to genderequality and narrowed gaps in education, health, and economic and political opportunity;however, substantial differences remain, especially in South Asia, the Middle East, and subSaharan Africa. The results suggest countries can make meaningful improvements in genderequality, even while significant income differences between countries remain.JEL Classification Numbers: I3, J1, J16Keywords: Economics of gender, gender indicators and indicesAuthors’ E-Mail Addresses: jstotsky@imf.org; sshibuya@imf.org; lkolovich@imf.org;skebhaj@imf.org*We are grateful to Mark Blackden, Diane Elson, Stephan Klasen, Jenny Lah and IMF colleagues, Andy Berg,Nen Gang, La-Bhus Fah Jirasavetakul, Kalpana Kochhar, Pritha Mitra, Monique Newiak, Cathy Pattillo,Victoria Perry, Jesmin Rahmin, and Genevieve Verdier, for useful suggestions, Carla Intal for excellentresearch assistance, and Jing Wang and Biva Joshi for excellent administrative support. This paper is part of aresearch project on macroeconomic policy in low-income countries supported by the U.K.’s Department forInternational Development (DFID), and it should not be reported as representing the views of the InternationalMonetary Fund or of DFID.
ContentsPageI.II.III.Introduction . 4Indicators versus Indices and Data Issues . 5Trends in Selected Indicators . 8A. World Trends by Region and Income Group .10B. Education .11C. Health .13D. Economic Opportunity .19E. Political Opportunity.22IV. Overview and Comparison of Gender Equality Indices .24A. Gender Development Index, Old and Revised .24B. Gender Inequality Index .29C. Gender Equality Index .31D. Global Gender Gap Index .31E. Social Institutions and Gender Index .32F. Women’s Economic Opportunity Index .33G. Relative Status of Women and Gender Gap Measure Indices .33H. Quantitative Comparison of the Gender Equality Indices .33V. Extension of the UNDP’s Gender Equality Indices Backward in Time .34VI. Relationship of the Gender Equality Indices to Income .40VII. Uses of the Indicators and Indices for Policy Analysis and Decision Making .41VIII. Conclusion .42References .44Tables1.Definitions of Selected Gender-Related Indicators . 82.Correlations Between the Gender Equality Indices .343.Correlations Between the Indicators .354.Regression of Gender Equality Indices on Per Capita Income .405.Regression of Time Consistent Gender Equality Indices on Per Capita Income .41Figures1.Gross Secondary Enrollment .122.Life Expectancy at Birth (Female to male ratio) .143.Life Expectancy at Birth (Years) .154.Number of Countries with Female to Male Life Expectancy Ratio Below 1.05 .165.Child Mortality, Under the Age of 5 (Female to male ratio) .176.Maternal Mortality Ratio (Modeled estimate, per 100,000 live births) .187.Labor Force Participation Rate, Ages 15-64 (Female to male ratio) .208.Labor Force Participation Rate, Ages 15-64 (Percent) .21
9.10.11.12.13.Mean Monthly Earnings of Employees (Female to male ratio) .22Seats Held by Women in National Parliaments (Percent of total) .23GDI, Time Consistent Version .37GDI, Time Consistent Version, with Labor Force Participation Rate .38GII, Time Consistent Version .39Box1.Comparison of the HDI, GDI, and GII .25AppendixA. Gender-Related Data .49TablesA1. List of Gender Indicators .49A2. Data Initiatives .54FiguresA1. Data Availability—Economic Opportunity, 1980-2014 .52A2. Data Availability—Education, 1980-2014 .52A3. Data Availability—Health, 1980-2014 .53A4. Data Availability—Political Opportunity, 1980-2014 .53B. List of Countries by Region and LIDC Classification .55TableB1. Countries and Their Classification .55C. Data on Gender Indices .56TableC1. Index Data Sources and Availability.56D. Replication, Extension, and Revision of the GDI and GII .57TablesD1. Overview of the Indicators Included in the GDI.57D2. Wage Data Coverage by Region .59D3. Spearman Rank Correlation for Different Calculations of the GDI .60FigureD1. Female and Male Expected Years of Schooling .58
I.IntroductionIn the past several decades, the world moved closer to gender equality and saw theadvancement of women across a wide range of economic, social, and political indicators, inall regions of the globe. Nonetheless, throughout the world, women remain at a disadvantageto men in important areas of social, economic, and political life. The MillenniumDevelopment Goals explicitly called for gender equality. Its successor, the SustainableDevelopment Goals, adopted in 2015, sets targets for the international community over thenext 15 years.1 Goal 5 of its 17 broad goals explicitly calls for gender equality and theempowerment of women and girls.This paper examines trends in indicators of gender equality and advancement of women,using evidence derived both from individual indicators and gender equality indices, whichaggregate a number of critical indicators. We introduce our own version of the gender indicesconstructed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), namely, the GenderDevelopment Index (GDI) and Gender Inequality Index (GII). We replicate and reconstructthese indices backward in time in a consistent manner to examine trends over several decades.In the first part of the paper, we focus on individual indicators that are central in measuringaspects of women’s life where equality is important, and also those of greatest relevance todeveloping countries, where gender-based differences or gaps tend to remain largest.Women’s advancement in access to education and health status and an ability to earn incomeor participate in the labor market are all commonly accepted indicators of economic andsocial well being. In the political realm, women’s participation in elected office and other keypolitical positions is one way of measuring women’s empowerment.We find, as with a number of other recent studies, that the trends in individual indicatorspoint toward improvement in education, health, economic opportunity, and politicalempowerment, but progress across the world is uneven.2 When grouped by geographicregions, we observe that South Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia, and sub-SaharanAfrica lag other regions, even though these regions have all recorded significantimprovement in key indicators. When grouped by level of economic development, we seethat countries at all levels of development have generally made progress, though there areperiods when progress is more rapid than others. The low-income developing countries(LIDCs) tend to lag. The gaps between the advanced countries and emerging countries aresurprisingly small on some indicators, suggesting that considerable progress can be madeeven while significant income gaps remain.1See United Nations (2015).2See Morrison et al. (2008), World Bank (2011), Clinton Foundation and Gates Foundation (2015), andUN Women (2015).4
Because indicators capture distinct elements of women’s equality with men, we also examinegender equality indices. We survey the growing literature on indices to highlight variations intheir construction, which explains why countries may have different measures of equality,depending on the index. We focus our analysis of trends on our own newly created versionsof the UNDP’s GDI and GII, for which we have constructed a consistent series goingbackward in time. We use the UNDP’s gender equality indices to construct the time seriesbecause these indices tend to be the most prominently used ones in this area, and because theindividual variables used in their construction are similar to the key individual indicatorspresented in the first part of the paper. This parallel structure allows us to explain more easilythe trends in the indices on the basis of the trends in the underlying indicators. As with theindividual indicators, the trends in the gender equality indices show progress across the worldin gender equality over the past few decades, although significant gaps remain whencomparing countries grouped by region and by level of economic development. Some cleardifferences in the rates of change across regions and levels of development emerge.The remainder of this paper is as follows: Section II contrasts individual indicators andgender equality indices and discusses some data-related issues. Section III examines trends inthe individual indicators. Section IV contrasts different gender equality indices. Section Vexamines trends over time in the UNDP’s two gender equality indices using our ownversions of them. Section VI relates the gender equality indices to income. Section VIIexamines the use of indicators and indices for policy analysis. Section VIII concludes.II.Indicators versus Indices and Data IssuesTwo ways to capture trends in women’s development and gender equality are throughindividual indicators and composite indices. Both approaches have distinct advantages anddisadvantages.Sex-disaggregated individual indicators provide information regarding one aspect ofwomen’s development or gender equality. They provide a readily accessible basis forassessing progress and offer insight for policymakers into specific development targets. Onthe other hand, because these indicators examine only one facet of women’s development orgender equality, policymakers and researchers may overlook other key areas of focus. Thevarious indicators may not always move together and may even move in inconsistentdirections. Thus, it is helpful to analyze several different indicators to capture the trends.Composite indices, derived from aggregating individual indicators, provide an alternative toindividual indicators. The UNDP was a pioneer in constructing an index to measure women’sdevelopment. Starting from the UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI), a widelyrespected series which aggregates measures of education, health, and income to assessrelative human development levels among countries, the GDI was constructed to assess the5
gap between men and women’s development. The first version of the GDI could not be usedindependently of the HDI. In recent years, the UNDP has both revised the GDI to be a standalone index and created the GII. A number of other gender equality indices, designed tocapture trends in equality and address gaps in previous indices, have appeared. Some of theseindices are discussed in greater detail in section IV.The main advantage of gender equality indices is their ability to provide a broaderperspective than individual indicators. However, the different combination of indicators,weighting of indicators, and method of aggregation have led to a certain degree ofarbitrariness in the formulation of the indices. This has led to an ongoing debate regardingthe merits of each index, which we summarize later.3Analyzing trends in gender equality is challenging because it requires some value judgmentsas to what is meant by equality between men and women.4 We present trends, rather thanlevels, to avoid making judgments as to what the precise differences between females andmales should be. We also use relative measures, mainly female to male ratios, which is themost common approach in the literature, rather than absolute differences.For some variables, such as primary or secondary education completion rates, equivalencebetween men and women is a reasonable goal. Likewise, we would expect for politicalempowerment that equality between men and women is a reasonable goal, with some modestdeviations expected in countries where, for various reasons related to conflict or migration,there may be a significant imbalance between women and men. In the area of health,women’s natural life expectancy is about four to five years longer than men’s. It isreasonable that gender equality would aim to achieve this biological norm rather than seekingto achieve exact equality of life expectancy.Women’s labor force participation rate is lower than men’s in most countries. There is,nonetheless, considerable variation in the relative rates of participation and in some countries,women’s participation rate has come close to men’s participation rate, as the men’s rate hasplateaued or fallen. A large literature looks at determinants of women’s labor forceparticipation (e.g., Bertrand, 2011; Fernandez and Fogli, 2009). Differences in participationrates that cannot be explained by individual workers’ rational choices or are influenced bysocial customs that preclude women from working when they would prefer to do so wouldsuggest unaddressed gender biases.3See also Klasen (2006b), Klasen and Schüler (2011), Hawken and Munck (2013), Permanyer (2013), and VanStaveren (2013).4See Klasen (2004) and Casarico and Profeta (2015) for further discussion.6
Good indicators should satisfy a number of properties, including broad country coverage andavailability on a long time series basis. These indicators should be constructed in similarways across countries and over time. Sex-disaggregated data suffer from spotty coverageacross time and countries, a constraint on the analysis, but one that does not fundamentallyundermine the ability to track trends in key variables. Appendix A provides more detail ongender-relevant indicators available in the World Bank’s World Development Indicatorsdatabase and the degree of their country coverage over time.There are a number of international initiatives underway to improve these indicators. TheUnited Nations (UN), in conjunction with a number of other international organizations, haslaunched a three-year international effort to identify and improve collection of key indicatorson women’s well-being, called the Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) project.A primary goal is to supply data for the UN’s Statistical Commission’s Minimum Set ofGender Indicators, which covers areas related to women’s participation in economic andpolitical activities, access to resources, education, health, and human rights.5 A supportinginternational gender data initiative is Data2X.6Most microeconomic data on individual behavior are derived from household surveys. Onlysome of these data, such as labor force participation, are disaggregated by sex. Manyvariables, such as consumption or asset holdings, and often income, may only be available ona household basis. Klasen (2004) points to the lack of data on intra-household resourceallocation, which limits analysis on how well men and women’s different household needsare met. Folbre (2006) notes the importance of including time use data as another source ofinformation, though these data can be difficult to obtain on a regular basis. Women havetraditionally borne a disproportionate burden of unpaid work and, thus, improved informationon time use provides a better understanding of men and women’s well being, supplementingeconomic and other socioeconomic measures.A related point is that data can be relevant to the analysis of gender even when they are notdisaggregated by sex. In addition to household income, consumption, and assets, some keyindicators of standard of living or quality of life in developing countries, such as access topower, clean water, and sanitatio
Two ways to capture trends in women’s development and gender equality are through individual indicators and composite indices. Both approaches have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Sex-disaggregated individual indicators provide information regarding one aspect of women’s development or gender equality.
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