Gender Progress Index

Gender Progress Index

Mao Zedong once remarked that “women hold up half the sky.” Yet in many countries today women are not fulfilling their potential due to cultural, legal and social impediments. But just as society loses when women fall short, so too when men are stifled. Society progresses when all its members are able to achieve more.

The Gender Progress Index (GPI) is a measure of female-male progress that considers both the level of progress as well as the gap between the two. Levels are important as a country where people are equally under-utilised is not ideal. The gap is important as it indicates the internal gender dynamics within a country. The GPI also takes an agnostic view on female-male outcomes: male under-performance of female outcomes is equal to the inverse.

To capture both the significance of levels and ratios into an index a measure can be defined using both level and ratio as inputs: y = f (L,R). This can be done using a Cobb-Douglas utility function with constant returns to scale: y = (L^0.5)*(R^0.5) where L is the unit-free score derived from the level values (a distance-to-frontier function) and R is the ratio of female-to-male or male-to-female value of the indicators, where the ratio taken is the one that is less than or equal to 1. The Cobb-Douglas utility with constant returns to scale (and with parameter alpha = 0.5) has many nice mathematical properties that makes it a robust index function. Full details on the methodology can be found here.

Below are the ten countries with the best gender progress. These are the countries that are best at achieving the full potential of their country:

1. Norway (0.698)
2. Sweden (0.685)
3. Netherlands (0.659)
4. Denmark (0.649)
5. Finland (0.648)
6. New Zealand (0.646)
7. Iceland (0.645)
8. Germany (0.642)
9. Canada (0.638)
10. France (0.637)

The Gender Progress Index can be found here.