Measuring Gender (In)Equality: The OECD Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base

Abstract

The Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base (GID-DB) is a new cross-country research tool with comprehensive measures of gender equality. It improves upon existing sources because it is the only data base on gender that systematically incorporates indicators of social norms, traditions and family law. The GID-DB thereby permits analysis of hypotheses that link cultural practices to gender equality, human development and economic growth. A cross-country comparison of the data indicates that inequalities in social institutions are particularly pronounced in countries with low female literacy rates, but correlate less strongly with Gross Domestic Product per capita. Similarly, our econometric analysis suggests a clearly negative correlation between gender inequality of the OECD Development Center and women's labor-force participation.*The views expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the authors

Family burden related to mental and physical disorders in the world: results from the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) surveys

“…The only exception to this pattern is the magnitude of financial expenditure, as, compared with men, women are less likely to be employed and more likely to earn less on the same jobs and raise children alone. 35,36 As reported in previous studies, there was evidence that family mental health conditions were associated with higher family burden than were physical conditions ''at the individual level'' 37,38 ; that is, in comparing the likelihood of a given caregiver experiencing burden as a function of whether their relative's illness was a mental disorder or a physical disorder. This finding is especially striking given that the analysis was biased against finding betweencondition differences in burden (as we asked respondents to tell us only about ''serious'' relative health problems), and we would expect this truncation of the severity distribution to reduce evidence of between-condition differences in burden.…”

Testing Todd and Matching Murdock: Global Data on Historical Family Characteristics

“…One source for this is the OECD's Gender, institutions and development database (GID-DB), containing data for non-OECD countries for 2009 (Jütting et al 2008;OECD 2009). Because part of this dataset, and the resulting Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), take into account 'family code' (consisting of indicators on early marriage, polygamy, parental authority, inheritance), this data is very well suited for comparisons with data on family practices.…”

“…And do similar family systems appear from these two sources and from more recent data, such as the OECD's Gender, Institutions and Development Database (GID-DB; Jütting et al 2008;OECD 2009), the censuses available through IPUMS (Minnesota Population Center 2013) and the data of the World Values Survey?…”

Gender difference in support for Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do social institutions matter?

“…In the same spirit, Branisa et al (2013) have created a social institutions and gender-related index (hereafter SIGI) which is an aggregate measure of the different indicators presented in Jütting et al (2008). Using cross-country data, Branisa et al (2013) have analyzed the effect of the SIGI on various development outcomes.…”

“…Recently, Jütting et al (2008) have presented the OECD data from the Gender, Institutions and Development database that complements the existing gender discrimination indexes. This is the first data on gender inequality that takes into account different measures of social norms, traditions and family laws.…”