Gender Empowerment Measure
UNDP Human Development Report Office
To capture gender inequality in three key areas: the extent of women’s political participation and decision-making, economic participation and decision-making power and the power exerted by women over economic resources.
UNDP
To capture gender inequality in three key areas: the extent of women’s political participation and decision-making, economic participation and decision-making power and the power exerted by women over economic resources.
Part of the Human Development Report, widely quoted in international media.
The measure uses estimated earned income based on non-agricultural wages, percentage of parliamentary seats by gender, percentage of technical positions held by women and percentage of legislators, senior officials and managers who are women.
The GEM coverage includes all UN members for which data is available.
First data: 2003
Latest data: Collected in 2004
Stated frequency: Produced annually
Human Development Report Office
304 E. 45th Street, 12th Floor, New York 10017
Tel: +1 (212) 906-3661 Fax: +1 (212) 906-3677
The measure is calculated in 3 parts. Firstly the relative share of parliamentary seats is calculated, compared to an ideal of 50% for each gender. Secondly a similar method is used for each of the economic participation measures. Lastly an income measure is calculated. The three are then combined into a single index. The income measure is a proxy calculated using information about female/ male shares of non-agricultural wage and female/ male shares of the economically active population.
The index runs from 0 to 1 with 1 being the maximum. A higher score is desirable.
This measure should be used to advocate further opportunities for women. The regular production, and publication of the supporting data means that the measure can also be dissected to examine the factors underlying any result.
The UNDP HDR produces a separate Gender Development Index, which focuses more on women’s capabilities. The empowerment measure is not designed as a development measure.
The core underlying assumption is that empowered women would make the same choices as men. That is that they would go for the same jobs, seek election to parliament just as frequently and undertake work at similar levels. The implication of this is that empowerment concerns not just the ability and opportunity to make choices, but that those choices would be exercised in a particular manner. Note that empowerment data which relate only to choices (not their result) is not available.
For calculating the female share of the wage bill the measure has assumed that the ratio of female to male wages in non-agricultural jobs applies to the whole economy. For missing data the authors substitute a value of 0.75 for the ratio of female to male non-agricultural wage, implying that unless other data is available it is assumed that women earn approx ¾ of the male wage.
