Cross-National Indices with Gender-Differentiated Data: What Do They Measure? How Valid Are They?

The HDI 2010: new controversies, old critiques

“…See Anand and Sen [6] for an elaboration of this point. 31 Ravallion at times appears to disagree with the idea that the MRS should increase with income, and at other times he appears to be objecting only to the speed with which it declines. For example, he writes "It can be granted that a rich person will be able to afford to spend more to live longer than a poor person, and will typically do so.…”

“…Ravallion argues that the rate at which the trade-off increases with income, (which will vary inversely with the degree of substitutability), is too high. 31 The arithmetic formula also means that results are sensitive to the choice of normalization. The problem emerges from the fact that the ordering produced by an additive functional form is not invariant to the scale used for measurement of the dimensions.…”

“…72 The GII includes educational attainment, economic and political 71 Critics noted three key drawbacks of the GDI and GEM: that they combine absolute and relative achievements, thus a country with low income scores poorly even with perfect gender parity; that extensive imputations were needed to fill missing data; and that nearly all indicators in the GEM arguably reflect a strong urban elite bias and use some indicators more relevant to developed countries. Hawken and Munck [31] and Klasen and Schüler [36] provide useful reviews. 72 See Gaye et al [29].…”

The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and Measuring Gender Inequality: A Technical Articulation for Asia-Pacific

“…Because the parameters are not the same in different nations and the scope of data collection also varies, it is very difficult to come up with variables that are uniform in all the nations. Hawken and Munck (2013) pointed out that data availability was not seen as a constraint for the construction of GII and that new data can be generated to measure certain indicators that are considered central to an index's overarching concept.…”

Why call it ‘equality’ when it should be ‘achievement’? A proposal to un-correct the ‘corrected gender gaps’ in the EU Gender Equality Index

“…Different authors have already made exhaustive reviews of these indices (e.g. : Dijkstra 2002, Permanyer 2010, Mills 2010, Bericat 2011or Hawken and Munck 2013, so here we will only summarize the ones which, for conceptual or technical reasons, are related to the GEI.…”