A new academic study finds men, on average, are more disadvantaged than women in 91 countries compared with a relative disadvantage for women in 43 countries.
Researchers from the University of Missouri and University of Essex in the United Kingdom say their Basic Index of Gender Inequality “presents a simplified but more accurate picture of peoples’ well-being than previous calculations.”
The metric focuses on three factors: educational opportunities, healthy life expectancy and overall life satisfaction.
The researchers calculated what they call “BIGI scores” for 134 nations, representing 6.8 billion people.
David Geary, a professor of psychology at Missouri, said the research published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE “sought to correct the bias toward women’s issues in existing measures and at the same time develop a simple measure that is useful in any country in the world, regardless of their level of economic development.”
The researchers found the world’s most developed countries come closest to achieving gender equality, albeit with a slight advantage for women.
In the least developed countries, women nearly always fall behind men, they said, largely because they have fewer opportunities to get a good education.
The researchers noted that the Global Gender Gap Index, introduced in 2006, had been one of the most established and well-used measures of national gender inequality.
But Stoet and Geary contend the index does not measure issues in which men are at a disadvantage, such as harsher punishments for the same crime, compulsory military service and more occupational deaths.
The Global Gender Gap Index also often makes it difficult to distinguish whether gender differences are the result of inequality or personal preference.
“No existing measure of gender inequality fully captures the hardships that are disproportionately experienced by men and so they do not fully capture the extent to which any nation is promoting the well-being of all its citizens,” said Gijsbert Stoet, professor of psychology at University of Essex.
He said the BIGI “provides a much simpler way of tackling gender inequality and it focuses on aspects of life that are directly relevant to all people.”
Researchers say that when BIGI is included along with other existing models of gender equality, it provides additional information, presenting a fuller picture of gender equality that can be used by policymakers to introduce changes to improve the quality of life for both men and women.
“Internationally, improvements in gender parity may be reached by focusing on education in the least developed nations and by focusing on preventative health care in medium and highly developed nations,” Stoet said.
