Gender Inequality

A country’s overall level of development can mask inequalities in the status of men and women. The quest for an improved standard of living, access to knowledge, health, and a sustainable future are aspirations of people in all countries. Yet long-standing cultural and legal obstacles can limit women’s participation in development and access to its benefits.

The U.N. uses two indexes to measure gender inequality: the Gender Inequality Index (GII) and the Gender Development Index (GDI). The U.N. has not found a single country in the world where the women are treated as well as the men according to the GII and only a handful according to the GDI. At best, women have achieved near-equality with men in some countries, but in other countries, the level of development for women lags far behind the level for men. The U.N. argues that inequality between men and women is a major factor that keeps a country from achieving a higher level of development.

Gender Inequality Index

The Gender Inequality Index (GII) measures the gender gap in the level of achievement in three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and the labor market. The GII uses similar methodology to the IHDI discussed on the previous page. The higher the GII, the greater the inequality between men and women. A score of 0 would mean that men and women fare equally, and a score of 1.0 would mean that women fare as poorly as possible in all measures.

Gender Inequality Index, 2018

The highest numbers, and therefore the highest inequality, are in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The lowest GII numbers are in Europe.

The GII is .468 in developing countries compared with .170 in developed ones. Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southwest Asia & North Africa are the developing regions with the highest levels of gender inequality. Reproductive health is the largest contributor to gender inequality in these regions. South Asia and Southwest Asia & North Africa also have relatively poor female empowerment scores. At the other extreme, 21 countries, including 17 in Europe, as well as Canada, have GIIs less than 0.1, meaning that men and women are nearly equal. In general, countries with high HDIs have low GIIs and vice versa.

The United States has a GII rank of only 36, although it ranks twelfth in the world in HDI. The U.N. points to two factors accounting for the relatively low U.S. GII ranking. Compared with other very high HDI countries, the United States has a much higher birth rate among teenage women and a higher mortality rate among women during childbirth. The percentage of women in the national legislature is lower in the United States than in other high HDI countries.

Teenage Mother and Baby, United States

Pause & Reflect 10.2.3

The GII is .189 in the United States and .092 in Canada. Which country has greater gender inequality? What factors might be contributing to that greater inequality?

Gender Development Index

The Gender Development Index (GDI) measures the gender gap in the level of achievement for the three dimensions of the Human Development Index: income, education, and life expectancy. The GDI uses the same methodology as the HDI, described in the previous section. Countries are ranked based on their deviation from gender parity in the three dimensions of the HDI.

If females and males had precisely the same HDI scores, the GDI would be 1.000. In fact, the overall GDI in the world is .941, which means that the average HDI for all females in the world (.705) is 94.1 percent of the average HDI for all males (.749). The average in developed regions is .983, indicating close to parity, whereas the average in developing countries is .917. The lowest scores are in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southwest Asia & North Africa (Figure 10-30).

Gender Development Index, 2018

GII Over Time

The U.N. has found that gender inequality has declined since the 1990s in all but 4 of 138 countries for which time-series data are available (Figure 10-31). The greatest improvement has been in Southwest Asia & North Africa. The improvement in gender inequality has been relatively modest in the United States.

Trend in Gender Inequality

The map shows the change in GII from the late 1990s to 2015. All but a handful of countries have seen an improvement in the GII.