Gender inequality

According to this article (Danish), Denmark is quote “the worst of the Nordic countries at gender equality” (the headline).

I will now do what the media won’t or can’t do: critically evaluate a study and not just pass on the press releases they get from interest groups (yes, this is how things work in the media).

Note that I’ve only quickly glanced through the report upon which the article is based, so this is just a cursory assessment – and yet after just half an hour or so, I can present damning criticisms of the report. The report can be found here (English).

Read on.

First of all, the report focuses on equality of results, e.g. there is inequality if women earn less then men, and not equality of opportunity, e.g. there is inequality if women are required by law to earn less than men (you get the point). This of course makes a huge normative difference. Many, including my self as a libertarian, wonder why we should care that the end result differs, if this difference is the result of individual choice and not state coercion. Why should it be bad that different people chose different things?

From the report:

Our aim is to provide a snapshot of where men and women stand with regard to some fundamental outcome variables related to basic rights such as health, education, economic participation and political empowerment.Variables related to countryspecific policies, culture or customs—factors that we consider to be “input” or “means” variables—are not included in the Index [...]. (p. 3, my bold).

Secondly, the report only counts inequality if it is to the disadvantage of women. If women score higher on some variable than men, then the score is 1, equality. Thus, there is a huge (albeit dependent on chosen variables) ex ante bias towards lower scores for women than for men. If the study only utilized two hypothetical variables, the one of which gave the women a 50% advantage over men, and the other gave men a 50% advantage over women, then the end score would be 0.75 - inequality – rather than 1 (equality).

From the report:

Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen variables has declined, rather than whether women are “winning” the “battle of the sexes”. Hence, the Index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men in particular variables. (p.4, my bold)

Also, and revealingly:

To capture “gender equality”, two possible scales were considered. One was a negative-positive scale capturing the size and direction of the gender gap.This scale essentially penalizes either men’s advantage over women or women’s advantage over men, and gives the highest points to absolute equality.The second was a “onesided” scale that measures how close women are to reaching parity with men but does not reward or penalize countries for having a gender gap in the other direction. Thus it does not reward countries for having exceeded the parity benchmark. We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes. (p. 4, my bold)

More appropriate for your purposes? I wonder why…

In practical terms, this allows the report to claim equality (score = 1) in educational issues, even though clearly women are overrepresented in the educational system.

Third, lets take a look at the variables used.

First, economic participation and opportunity is measured by various means, including the ratio of women to men among “legislators, senior officials, and managers” (p. 4).

Second, political empowerment is measured. The measures for this variable are very problematic. a) the report uses “ratio of men to women in ministry-level positions and the ratio of men to women in parliamentary positions” (ibid.). Note how the report uses a variable more or less equal to one measuring economic participation – ensuring that this variable, which coincidentally is an area widely known for its especially large disparities between the sexes, gains extra weight in the final aggregation. b) Another measurement is the ratio of men and women occupying the prime ministership/presidentship “in the past 50 years” (ibid., my italics). This therefore doesn’t measure equality now, but in the last 50 years, ensuring an even more biased end result. Also, this variable obviously must have disproportionate influence. The report even says this (more or less) in its assessment of Finland:

Finland (2) also shows a marked improvement across the board and this year wins the unique distinction of holding the number one spot on three subindexes: health and survival, educational attainment and political empowerment. The continued tenure of Tarja Halonen as Finland’s first female president has helped boost the country to the highest ranking on political empowerment. (p. 15, my bold)

Third, for a variable measuring health inequality they use two variables:

First, we use the gap between women and men’s healthy life expectancy, calculated by the World Health Organization.This measure provides an estimate of the number of years that women and men can expect to live in good health, by taking into account the years lost
to violence, disease, malnutrition or other relevant factors. The second variable included in this subindex is the sex ratio at birth.

I am not sure whether using “healthy life expectancy” instead of the straight-forward “life expectancy” (which of course would favor women) skews the result…but I can only suspect so. I also admit (as I said, this was a cursory inspection) that I’m not sure whether more baby boys is counted as a disadvantage to women…but as this also would “help” to get the correct result, I suspect so.

My fourth point regarding the variables is this: why didn’t they use the following variables:

- Crime ratios

- Death ratios (suicide, traffic, narcotics, etc.)

- Drug use

- Happiness ratios

- And many more such social issues

I know the answer: in these, men are the ones “disadvantaged” statistically, and are thus ignored, even though they are arguable more important to the socially conscious individual than than ones typically focused upon by these same individuals (e.g. wages – shouldn’t we stop focusing on money money money? Isn’t it more important how we live our lives, how happy we are?).

Fourth, lets take a look at the rankings of each group of variables. The most equal countries in terms of “economic participation and opportunity” are Mozambique, Moldova, Tanzania, and Azerbaijan. Enough said? Also, how come the top 36 countries have exactly the same score on health issues (this is not a retorical question, although I might find the answer if I cared to spend more time analyzing the results).

Fifth, on the basis of a couple of graphs, the report concludes that it

track[s] the strong correlation between the gender gap and national competitiveness and sends a clear message to policy-makers to incorporate gender equality into their national priorities.

…but correlation is not causation. Maybe national competitiveness (or some third variable) causes gender equality? This type of question is obvious to anyone who doesn’t want to see something in a set of data.

Those are the major thoughts from my cursory reading of the report. I expect everyone to be thankful to me for doing what the compliant media doesn’t: read things critically.