BIGI v GGGR

The logo of Gender Equality Info – the site of Gijsbert Stoet

New year’s resolution: no more over-long posts

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For once I have some good news. You may recall the Global Gender Gap Report (GGGR). I did a post on the 2014 edition over 4 years ago, here. The best I can say for the GGGR is that it brought home to me just how badly we were being misled. It is produced by the World Economic Forum. Who they? Think globalisation. Think Davos. They produce this 355 page document which is like an old fashioned telephone directory, stuffed full of numbers. And meaningless. The 2018 version is here

I’ll leave you to ponder the link between globalism and feminism – but here it is made manifest.

You could read my earlier post for just how preposterous is the GGGR, but the main thing is this: they define a ratio which is less than one if women are disadvantaged compared to men, and greater than one if men are disadvantaged compared to women.

Except that they don’t. They truncate the ratio at 1. Relative disadvantage of men is redefined as equality. Seriously, I’m not making this up. Here’s the relevant quote,

“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, as it does not reward countries for having exceeded the parity benchmark.”

Wrap your head around that. Not only are they deliberately hiding male disadvantage, but in their topsy-turvy minds they think of it as “exceeding the parity benchmark” and that an indication of male disadvantage might be something deserving a reward. 

I’m not going to give you chapter and verse on how the GGGR measures the gender gap, but here are some of the key elements which contribute,

  • Participation rates in employment;
  • Gender pay gap;
  • An advancement gap which is said to be “captured through two hard data statistics (the ratio of women to men among legislators, senior officials and managers, and the ratio of women to men among technical and professional workers)“;
  • A measure of political empowerment which “measures the gap between men and women at the highest level of political decision-making through the ratio of women to men in ministerial positions and the ratio of women to men in parliamentary positions“.

Do those reflect the interests of any particular lobby, at all? The last bullet, in particular, affects only a vanishingly small proportion of people, of either sex in any country. So as a measure of a gender gap applicable to the general population it is utterly absurd. The GGGR measures the feminism gap, not a gender gap. 

In all those countries where boys do substantially less well in education than girls, the education gender attainment ratio gets truncated at 1, vanishing away this major disadvantage to boys.

An even more outrageous trick is used for longevity. In every country in the world, men’s life expectancy is shorter than women’s. Yet the corresponding ratio is listed as less than 1, indicating female disadvantage. How is that trick accomplished? No problem, they did this…

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

Yes, 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 if women have an average life only 5% greater than men’s, this is recorded as a disadvantage to women.

The only impressive thing about the GGGR is that they have the bare faced nerve to promulgate this garbage. But why not? For years every partisan charity, journalist, parliamentarian and government agency has been quoting the GGGR as if it were holy writ. They should be ashamed.

Well, they may have a harder ride next time…

Which brings me to the good news. Academic psychologists Gijsbert Stoet (University of Essex) and David C. Geary (University of Missouri) have produced a more sane version of a global gender gap. They are to be congratulated for having the gumption to do so. They call it the Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI). Their paper is here and an associated web site is here.

Let me emphasise immediately that I do not prefer Stoet & Geary’s gender gap formulation because “it gives the right answer”. There is no right answer. The gender gap as a concept is daft. One cannot compare apples and oranges.

But Stoet & Geary’s BIGI at least avoids the blatant feminist bias of the GGGR. And its real value is that it exposes the GGGR for the arbitrary nonsense that it truly is. I must emphasise at this point that all this is my opinion, not that of Stoet & Geary. They are far more diplomatic. They write,

BIGI aims to provide a simplified and unbiased measure by focusing on key indicators that are relevant to all men and women in any society. BIGI focuses on key ingredients of a good life.

  1. Healthy Life Expectancy (years expected to live in good health)
  2. Basic education (literacy, and years of primary, and secondary education)
  3. Life satisfaction

By “unbiased” they mean not slanted towards feminist obsessions (though they are far too gentlemanly to express it thus), and by “relevant to all men and women” they mean avoiding measures skewed to the top 0.1% of society. One can’t argue with the sense of that.

However…I repeat, there is no such thing as a gender gap really. Even considering just one element, say education, how many different measures could one dream up? Dozens. How about the gender ratio of achieving A Levels? No, I don’t claim that is better than what Stoet & Geary actually use, it probably is not. I merely illustrate that there is no unique measure even of the single elements – and different measures can be numerically very different indeed. And as for “life satisfaction”, how in God’s name could that ever truly be quantified?

But worse, there can never be any comparability between the different elements, say between education and health. How many years life is worth a few percent more boys managing to get through secondary school? So the weighting of the different elements is impossible to decided and ultimately meaningless.

But that is not to detract from what Stoet & Geary have done. They have performed a most valuable service and are to be congratulated for having done so. The value of their work is that it explodes the GGGR (though I’m sure that is not their opinion).

The difference in the outcomes of GGGR and BIGI could hardly be more stark. All countries disadvantage women and girls according to the GGGR, because that is ensured by their measure: countries only differ in their degree of female oppression. But Stoet & Geary’s BIGI measure produces the following, rather different, result from an analysis of 134 countries,

In 91 (68%) of the 134 countries, men were on average more disadvantaged than women, and in the other 43 (32%) countries, women were more disadvantaged than men. The international median of the BIGI is -0.017 (SD = 0.062), that is, nearly a two percent deviation from parity, favoring women.

Great Britain was one of the countries where men were more disadvantaged based on the BIGI measure. In fact virtually all Western/Anglophone countries had a negative BIGI (men disadvantaged). The exception was Italy (which was marginal).

I’m guessing that regular readers of this blog have not fallen off their chairs in amazement.

Certain other lobbies will react rather differently. But now, when they roll out the preposterous GGGR gender gap as “proof” of their assertions, they’ll not be having such an easy ride. Now there is an alternative.

8 thoughts on “BIGI v GGGR

  1. Douglas

    On a similar but more focused line that the GGGR, I’ve just stumbled over a list of universities that are measured by their gender equality.
    https://www.timeshighereducation.com/rankings/impact/2021/gender-equality#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/undefined

    Like the GGGR, female advantage/male disadvantage is clearly treated as equality. This leads to the top-rated university being the Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University.

    That university is one of the 102 colleges and universities in Saudi Arabia that is for women only. Yep: that’s equality for you, feminist style.
    https://www.pnu.edu.sa/en/Pages/UniversityHistory.aspx

    Reply
  2. Douglas Milnes

    Some interesting comments have appeared on an Italian blog article about GGGR.

    Moreover, the global gender gap report considers that the natural proportion of males: females at birth (106 male births per 100 females) to be discrimination against women, and 6% less males should therefore be born alive to achieve parity. Obviously if the drop in the births of live males was greater, for example reducing to 90, 80 or even 70 males born alive every 100 females, it would always be “perfect equality”, index 1.00.

    They also point out that if the values against each sex are completely reversed in the report, to give men all the ‘disadvantages’ of women and women all the ‘advantages’ of men, women still come out disadvantaged: an obviously flawed methodology.

    Reply
  3. Douglas Milnes

    Belinda Brown has just published an article on the same subject, under the heading “A step towards correcting the feminist myths”

    Once we focus on core issues which affect people rather than feminist benchmarks of female inequality the mirage of female disadvantage disappears. In fact, in 91 of the 131 countries men were on average more disadvantaged than women.

    Reply
  4. paul parmenter

    As ever, remember to follow the money.

    Ensuring the impossibility of the male sex being defined as disadvantaged, no matter how badly they are treated or are suffering, has a blindingly obvious bonus for those exploiting the GGGR for their own transparent ends. It ensures that any funding – of which there will inevitably be plenty – to tackle and eliminate “inequality”, can only possibly head in one direction.

    Reply
  5. james murphy

    Convinced there’ll come a time (in a far off galaxy) when your sterling work on this website, your dedication to giving chapter and verse, so to speak, garners the gratitude, praise and intellectual appreciation it deserves from mature men and women everywhere in the western Anglophone world; a time when our descendants will all look back on these dark days and wonder at the progress of the feminist/SJW madness, how it began, the populations it ravaged, the cultures it wrecked. Like a sort of Black Plague of the mind, our age will, by then, have acquired an infamous mystique for having hosted the modern equivalent of the vile pandemic of 1348. I don’t believe I exaggerate. Though we are still currently relatively free, witness how much worse things have suddenly become over (even) the past two years: free speech and untrammelled thought physically threatened, men sacked for their opinions, livelihoods ruined, boys taught about toxic masculinity, white people vituperated for being white. It is terrifying how quickly the media can be enlisted by inimical forces to subvert a culture. As a disseminator of toxic cultural marxism the BBC has been an especially vicious propagandist, wielding an almost Goebbels-like grip on the narrative. No doubt it must get worse before it gets better – but get better it eventually will – and it will be thanks to brave individuals like you and Prof JP who have been prepared not only to bend your minds to the subject in hand but to do the accompanying spadework necessary. Bravo!

    Reply
  6. AJ

    The problem with any attempt to measure gender inequality is that it necessarily must combine measurementx of many different things so that the choice of the measures and how they are weighted becomes critical to the result, ultimately the measures selected and the weighting between them is arbitrary. Having said this and without looking at BIGI In detail it is clear that they have a clear and defensible rational for what is included and it has no egregious biases unlike CGGR. Despite that I find the CGGR report to have a far bigger impact and more persuasive in establishing that there is a bias against men in the west. The reason is that the BIGI is just an index which is reasonable enough but has the problem of any such index. The CGGR is from a prestigous organisation, is widely quoted and accepted yet is so blatantly and outrageously biased that no reasonable observer could consider it as anything other than sexist proganda. That it is not universally derided as nonsense is strong evidence of the true status and treatment of men and women.

    This report is one of a number of indicators that there is rising resistance to the narrative of men priviliged oppressors, women oppressed victims, but the momentum of legalislative and societal change is still towards advantaging women and disadvantaging men. How far will the current trend go before reversing?

    Reply
  7. Mike Buchanan

    It’s a shame BIGI doesn’t also consider gender differences in human rights (protection from genital mutilation being an obvious example, support for victims of domestic violence another). The figure for male disadvantage would then be much higher.

    Mike Buchanan

    JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS

    Reply
    1. William Collins Post author

      Indeed, which is why I stressed there is no real measure, not that BIGI is “right”. It’s just not so utterly preposterous as GGGR. But I list 34 male disadvantages, so… The useful thing is that credible academics have trashed GGGR (in an ever so gentlemanly way).

      Reply

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