Beyond half measures: how to improve gender gap indices

Article here. Excerpt:

'Measuring gender gaps is challenging. For one thing, distributions overlap even when there is a gap at the average. In the U.S., median female earnings are 18 percentage points lower than male earnings, but 40% of women earn more than the median man. Women live five years longer than men on average, but 36% of men live longer than the median woman. Analyzing gender gaps across different subgroups also complicates the picture: white women now earn considerably more than Black men, for example (at the average, of course).

Another potential difficulty is whether to focus only on gender gaps in one direction. The term “gender gap” is typically used to show inequalities where women are worse off than men. Many institutions and scholars focus on these gender gaps. But of course many gender gaps run the other way; these gaps are highlighted by our own work at the American Institute for Boys and Men. This is appropriate in either case; different institutions have different focuses.

A question arises, however, when it comes to indices of gender gaps, especially when these are used for comparative purposes. The most comprehensive existing indices do not measure gender gaps in both directions, instead reporting only the gaps where girls and women are behind boys and men. One example is the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (GGGR) produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The GGGR is the most commonly cited measure of gender gaps across countries. It captures and synthesizes a vast amount of data, measuring gender gaps in 146 countries across four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.'