Gender Empowerment Measure
The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) is an index designed to measure gender equality. GEM is the United Nations Development Programme's attempt to measure the extent of gender inequality across the globe's countries, based on estimates of women's relative economic income, participation in high-paying positions with economic power, and access to professional and parliamentary positions. It was introduced at the same time as the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) but measures topics like empowerment that are not covered by that index. 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.
Debates[edit]
As time passes, and these measures (the GDI and the GEM) are applied year after year, debate has arisen over whether or not they have been as influential in promoting gender-sensitive development as was hoped when they were first created. Some of the major criticisms of both measures includes that they are highly specialized and difficult to interpret, often misinterpreted, suffer from large data gaps, do not provide accurate comparisons across countries, and try to combine too many development factors into a single measure. The concern then arises that if these indices are not well informed, then their numbers might hide more than they reveal.[1]
In terms of the GEM in particular, it is often said to represent an elite bias.[1] 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.[2] 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.[1] 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."[7]
Furthermore, statistical information (data) is not very readily available for many of the indicators in the GEM. Not many less-developed countries collect reliable data on women's involvement in economic participation or labor involvement. As a result, the GEM is only reliable for very highly developed countries which do collect those statistics. It is also often argued that the number of women in parliament isn't an adequate indication of gender empowerment progress in a given country because many times feminists are considered political liabilities, and as such, female politicians do not always promote female interests. On the other hand, however, information regarding the number of parliamentary seats held by women is very easy to obtain, and very hard to alter, making it one of the more reliable sources of data in the measure. Another criticism of the GEM is its failure to address the issue of female control over their bodies and sexuality, which some argue is an important source of female empowerment and as such should be included in the measure.[2] Additionally, the GEM has also been criticized for being far too dependent on the income component of the measure for determining the overall GEM score.[3]
Suggestions for improving[edit]
Suggested alterations[edit]
Many suggestions have been made to alter the GEM. It has been suggested that the GEM be altered to include female representation in local government instead of only national government to make it less elite. Furthermore, it has been recommended that it should be revised to reflect female participation in political activities such as voting. Additionally, it has been recommended that a component regarding women's control over their own bodies and sexuality be added by measuring availability of birth control and the right to abortion. In fact, some have suggested that there is not enough consideration of women's health as a whole in the current GEM. 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.[8] It has also been suggested that the GEM could be altered to include the proportion of females who are in extreme poverty as opposed to the proportion of parliamentary positions held by females. Lastly, it has been suggested that the GEM could be altered to include female levels of unemployment.[2] Other suggestions include coming up with different ways to deal with the earned income part so as to make it a more straightforward mode of measurement.[9]