User:Mem0207/Gender Empowerment Measure

Lead Section

Summary addition: Since it was first adopted, the GEM has been employed in several academic studies related to empowerment as a reliable metric for comparing gender empowerment across different countries. It has also faced some harsh criticisms, and many alterations and alternatives have been proposed.

History

The United Nations created the Gender Empowerment Measure as an addition to their Human Development Index in 1995.

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Definition and calculation

Added subsection: Applications of calculations

One way the GEM has been employed is as a metric in academic research on comparative gender politics. For example, a study by Dr. Michael M.O. Seipel used the GEM to test the hypothesis that countries with less female representation in government will have spending rates that reflect more traditionally masculine values than do countries with more equal gender representation. Seiple took higher GEM to indicate more female representation in government. The study found that Seipel's hypothesis was correct: the higher a country’s GEM score, the higher their rate of spending on domestic programs like education and health care, which are correlated with traditionally feminine values. Inversely, countries with low GEM scores had higher rates of military spending, which correlate with traditionally masculine values.

Professor Leah E. Ruppanner used the 2004 GEM in to study the relationship between women's empowerment and women's share of housework in countries around the world. "Cross-national reports of housework: An investigation of the gender empowerment measure" concludes that the GEM and the elements that comprise it are key to understanding the proportional breakdown of housework between men and women. However, the total GEM and its compositional elements, Ruppanner warns, are not to be used interchangeably.

In 2011, Professors Sara C. Hitchman and Geoffrey T. Fong used the GEM in a study they conducted at the University of Waterloo entitled "Gender empowerment and female-to-male smoking prevalence ratios.". Employing the GEM as their metric for a country's level of gender empowerment, they found that, as countries increase in gender empowerment, the gap in smoking rates between men and women shrinks. While countries with low GEM ratings see far more men than women smoke, higher empowerment is correlated with higher smoking levels among women, much closer to that of the men in their country.

Debates

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In terms of the GEM in particular, it is often said to represent an elite bias. It has been accused of measuring inequality only among the most educated and economically advantaged women and to focus mainly on the higher echelons of society. Women in grassroots organizations or at the local political level are not reflected, as well as work in lower levels of employment or in the informal sector, where many women in poor and developing countries are forced to seek employment. My addition: Additionally, the GEM has been criticized for not taking into account the limitations on or differences in women's empowerment within certain religious and cultural contexts. Professor Jawad Syed calls this the GEM's "secular bias." (I suggest inserting a paragraph break here before the rest of what is currently the second paragraph)

Suggestions for improving

Suggested alterations:

My addition: It has been suggested that including infant mortality rate of females (IMR-F) and maternal mortality rate (MMR) be included in the calculations, as they are better suited to indicate women's health and lifecycle than is the more general life expectancy at birth (LEB) measure.

Added section + image: Applications of alterations:

Chhaya Sarkar, a woman chair of a Panchayat Samiti (local Indian legislature) opens a new photo exhibition.

In some developing countries where the aforementioned shortcomings of the GEM are especially pronounced, subnational calculations are made differently in order to produce a more accurate representation of women's empowerment there. For example, while the number of women in national Indian parliament may be slim, there are more women in local level government who would be unaccounted for. Thus many Indian states use local level parliamentary numbers when calculating their GEM and overall Human Development Reports (HDR).

Another example of these local level alterations is agricultural wages and employment. Agriculture accounts for a large share of women's employment in the developing world. To account for this in the GEM, West Bengal's 2004 HDR, for example, includes rural agricultural employment in its GEM calculations, whereas typically a GEM equation would only include non-agricultural wages. This alteration allows for a more representative and accurate GEM.