Gender Inequality In Research

The UN document, “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” agreed to by member states sets an aspiring vision for post-2015, determined to “work for a significant increase in investments to close the gender gaps and strengthen support for institutions in relation to gender equality and the empowerment of women at the global, regional and national levels. …” (para 20). However, globally a data revolution is required to capture the inequalities in gender sensitive human development, and in turn to construct appropriate measurement indices. This challenge is indeed tangible and methodological.
In measuring gender sensitive human development, the economic growth used in early empirical literature had constraints in capturing

This index was designed to capture women’s disadvantage in three dimensions- reproductive health, empowerment and economic activity. It reflects the loss in achievement due to inequality between men and women. An index of 0 implies that both the genders fare equally in all three select dimensions, whereas an index of 1 implies complete inequality. This paper examines the shortcomings of the existing GII and suggests an alternative choice of variables, functional forms and methodology to construct a gender inequality index in the context of Asia Pacific. The choice of countries is constrained by data paucity. The paper is organized into five sections. Section I deals with the theoretical and methodological issues in measuring gender inequality. Section II critically analyses GII; while Section III provides a critical take on the variables used by UNDP and suggest a new set of variables. Section IV deals with the GII construction using an alternative set of variables with the same functional form. Section V suggests the decomposed indices using a new set of variables. Section VI presents the GII estimates for Asia Pacific calibrated from the Principal Component analysis. Section VII

Inequality adjusted Human Development Index adjusts the Human Development index for inequality in each dimension across the entire population. Like HDI, it is calculated using geometric mean but using inequality-adjusted dimension indices. Inequality adjusted Human Development Index [IHDI] takes into account the achievements in terms of health, education and income by discounting each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality. Under perfect equality, HDI will equal IHDI. In cases of inequality, IHDI will fall below HDI. The difference between IHDI and HDI is the loss to human development due to inequality. IHDI is calculated for 145 countries by UNDP. Life expectancy is distributed across a group of subjects who have shared a particular event like distribution presented over different age intervals, whereas years of schooling and income are distributed across