Global Gender Gap Report

The press has been reporting on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report  2014 recently. I suppose I best take a look at it.

It’s big. Very big. In fact it’s 395 pages of utter nonsense.

It is almost insulting that the authors do not even try to hide their fraudulence. They are so arrogant in their power that they openly admit they have cooked the books. They know that they will get no challenge from the movers and shakers, the press, the media and the politicians. They know that they could fill 394 of those 395 pages with copy-and-paste from a telephone directory – so long as the conclusion on page 395 is that women are being disadvantaged. Then the media and the politicians will report just that. Who cares whether it’s based on garbage.

But I get ahead of myself. Darn it, I’ve given away the punch line – and you’d never have guessed.

The report purports to measure quantitatively the ‘gap’ between the present state of each  country and a state of equality between the sexes. It uses ‘gaps’ across four areas: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. These ‘gaps’ are defined as the number of women in the desired state to the number of men. For example, it might be the number of women attaining some educational level divided by the number of men attaining that same educational level. Or it might be the number of female government ministers divided by the number of male government ministers. Or it might be the ratio of female-to-male earned income. An overall ‘gender gap’ for a given country is defined as the simple average of the four contributing ‘gaps’.

In each case equality is represented by a ratio of 1. A ratio of less than 1 indicates female disadvantage. A ratio great than 1 indicates male disadvantage. Or, it would – if a ratio great than one were permitted. It isn’t.

Eh?

That’s right. If the ratio turns out to indicate male disadvantage, that is if it is greater than 1, they just set it back to 1.

They define male disadvantage as equality.

It really is as blatant and as outrageous as that. Honestly. I’m not making this up. As I said – they rely on no one actually reading the report.

They are entirely upfront about it. The report states that,

“the Index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men”

In case you failed to understand that, it continues,

“Thus a country, which has higher enrolment for girls rather than boys in secondary school, will score equal to a country where boys’ and girls’ enrolment is the same.”

In other words, male disadvantage = equality. You cannot accuse them of not making it clear. It is abundantly clear. But just in case you haven’t got the message yet, there’s this,

To capture gender equality, two possible scales were considered. One was a negative-positive scale capturing the size and direction of the gender gap. This scale penalizes either men’s advantage over women or women’s advantage over men, and gives the highest points to absolute equality. The second choice was a one-sided scale that measures how close women are to reaching parity with men but does not reward or penalize countries for having a gender gap in the other direction. We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes…..”

I’ll bet you do. And “one-sided” is an apt description. In case you haven’t grasped it, the “negative-positive” scale would have recognised cases of male disadvantage. The “one sided” scale simply air brushes away ratios greater than one (male disadvantage), leaving only cases of female disadvantage. The nature of the “equality” measure employed in the report mathematically guarantees that it can only appear to indicate female disadvantage. The last sentence in full reads,

“We find the one-sided scale more appropriate for our purposes, as it does not reward countries for having exceeded the parity benchmark.”

Do you see how twisted is the mindset of the authors? The only thing that crosses their minds in respect of cases of male disadvantage is that this might be worthy of a reward. But they are being ever so egalitarian and so they are willing to eschew the reward. What noble chaps they are.

Let me illustrate. In the Educational Attainment category the USA is given a “gap” index of 1, indicating equality. This is in a country where it is notorious that boys are sinking without trace in the educational system and the ratio of female to male college students is rapidly heading towards 2:1. According to this ever-so-erudite report, this is equality.

But we’ve not finished with the nonsense yet. The Health and Survival category is based upon the ratio of female healthy life expectancy over male value. The authors of this worthless report spotted that this one would give them trouble. Heck, it’s going to be greater than one: women live longer than men in just about every country in the world. No problem, they did this…

“the healthy life expectancy benchmark is set to be 1.06”

Yep, they simply redefined inequality of men as equality again. If women have on average a 6% longer life expectancy than men, this is regarded as equality in the “Survival” category. So by this shifting of the meaning of equality the report massages the score in the Health and Survival category  to be just a tiny bit less than one – almost equality with a little disadvantage to women – apparently.

Really? Well, let’s see now. When it comes to disadvantage, being dead takes some beating. And when it comes to being dead, men have pretty much cornered the market compared to women. The vast majority of war dead are men. The vast majority of deaths at work are men. Men are around three-quarters of suicide victims. Men are the majority of homicide victims. And most importantly, men have a shorter life expectancy worldwide. Moreover, there is evidence that men’s shorter life expectancy is not due to biology but life style. And the fact that significantly less is spent on male health care than on women’s might just be related to their shorter life span. But that all amounts to equality as far as this report goes.

Here’s an example of the scoring. This is for the UK…

  • Economic Participation and Opportunity = 0.714
  • Educational Attainment = 1
  • Health and Survival = 0.970
  • Political Empowerment = 0.270
  • Overall score (the average of the above) = 0.738

The Economic Participation and Opportunity “gap” is just our old friend the pay gap. Let’s not go there again. Suffice it to say that men doing most of the work and women doing most of the spending is disadvantage to women, apparently. But they have bumped up the apparent disadvantage by also including the “ratio of women to men among technical and professional workers“. Yes, they’ve managed to squeeze their STEM gripe in there too. Never mind the under-representation of men in teaching and health care. That doesn’t count – even though (and this may not be mere coincidence) it is in education and health that men are disadvantaged in terms of outcome for the population as a whole, not just in terms of employment.

The UK Educational Attainment and Health and Survival scores should, of course, be substantially bigger than 1, but this has been air brushed out.

Then there’s the Political Empowerment ‘gap’. This is defined essentially as the ratio of female to male Members of Parliament. Actually there is another measure too, which involves looking back 50 years – so even strict equality now would appear as disadvantage to women because of the sins of the past. This “historical disadvantage” is a favourite feminist trick to spuriously justify anything. But the true fraudulence is that political empowerment is not measured by the number of women in the legislature, because male politicians are obliged to be feminists too (even to the point of literally wearing the tee shirt). That the feminist lobby is the dominant political orthodoxy is proved by the press reception of this very report. Any rational journalist with a free hand would savagely excoriate this preposterous nonsense. That this has not happened is all the proof you need as to where the power lies in our country.

And finally, the overall “gap” – defined as the average of the four contributing “gaps”. Do note how ridiculous it is to take a simple, unweighted average of these “gaps”. Let me illustrate. Suppose the Political Empowerment “gap” was 0.5. By including this in a simple average with, say, the Health and Survival “gap” the implicit assumption is that not being a Member of Parliament is a disadvantage equivalent to being dead. Moreover, a “gap” of 0.5 would be equivalent to one sex having half the life expectancy of the other. Really? If there were twice as many men in parliament as women, this is as serious a problem as if women’s life expectancy was only 40? And no weighting is applied for the number of people actually affected by the disadvantage. There are only 650 Members of the UK Parliament, whereas the Health and Survival “gap” (which is actually to men’s disadvantage) affects the whole population.

In summary, in all four categories, Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment, it is actually women who are advantaged not disadvantaged. But why stop at just those four categories? There are so many other areas where men are disadvantaged – see the front page.

So, is the Global Gender Gap Report an example of sexism? No. This report has grown out of an anti-male sexist culture, of course. And cultural sexism leads to systemic bias and myriad random acts of misandry. But sexism per se is not goal directed. What we see in this report is an example of a long standing coordinated campaign driven by political ideology with cold blooded deliberation. This is beyond mere sexism.

10 thoughts on “Global Gender Gap Report

  1. Douglas

    On Political Empowerment (GGGR’s biggest issue), other than the intentional misrepresentations mentioned, are two other factors:

    1) No measure of the influence of the sexes on those in power, so the fact that most people in government are there because the majority voter is women is ignored. In a democratic country, it is ultimately the voter who has the political empowerment, not those the voter chooses to server them. That’s why suffragettes concentrated on having the vote more than on having the right to be elected.

    2) No measure of political representatives other than in national government. Never mind how a nation is structured, the composition of state or local governments are ignored. So too is the composition of supra-national and global governance, so MEPs are ignored, as are the unelected ambassadors who make a large difference on the world. Currently, of the seven UK ambassadors to the G7 countries, seven of them are women, as is the UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN.

    Reply
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  6. Chris Wedge

    A link to the original report would be appreciated, because not everyone has the time to pour through potentially unreliable Google searches…

    Reply
  7. Kronk

    Excellent article. Now, how to get the ‘men’ across this planet to finally wake up? After all, it is THEY that are allowing this to happen to Men, Boys and the Women who love them.
    I really must ask; when will we finally, finally have enough???

    Reply
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