What Can Gender Indices Tell Us about Gender Norms that Affect Adolescent Girls?

"In the context of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda in particular, gender indices will become even more relevant as a tool to measure countries' progress toward meeting goal number 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls."

This research and practice note looks in detail at 5 global indices that provide measures of gender equality and empowerment: the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI); the Gender Inequality Index (GIE); the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI); the African Gender Inequality Index (GEI); and the African Gender Development Index (AGDI). It is part of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI)'s Knowledge to Action Resource Series 2015, which was funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) as part of the 4-year programme Transforming the Lives of Adolescent Girls, which involved fieldwork in Ethiopia, Uganda, Nepal, and Viet Nam.

As noted here, gender indices can provide a summary measure of different indicators affecting the well-being and development of women and girls. They typically look at one or more of the following aspects of people's lives: health, education, economic empowerment, labour opportunities, political voice, and supportive laws and institutions. "While indices tend to measure outcomes across these dimensions rather than gender norms specifically, evidence of changes in the situation of women and girls in a country over time enables us to begin a conversation about the factors that have contributed to those changes." Each index is underpinned by a number of sub-indices or components that also provide relevant information for policymakers, development practitioners, researchers, or citizens

To give an overall picture: All 5 indices include measures of key areas of human development that are linked to broader national development outcomes (such as human capital, economic status and participation, and political voice). As such, they provide a more complete and multi-dimensional picture of the situation of women and girls. SIGI focuses directly on norms, while the other gender indices give insights into well-being outcomes that are related to norms and to other factors. They provide complementary information that we can use to uncover whether changes in gender norms are resulting in improvements in development outcomes for women and girls. Some indices have sub-indices that focus on particular areas of wellbeing or gender equality. Trends and scores in the indicators used to compile these sub-indices could give insights into changes in specific dimensions of women's and girls' lives. The availability of data for various countries and their ranking or classification is useful for benchmarking purposes. It means that is possible to compare the situation of women and adolescent girls in different countries and, where trend data are available, to look at progress made across multiple dimensions of their well-being. The indices thus can be an advocacy tool, motivating governments to do better to move up the ranking. They may also be useful for citizens and civil society groups pushing for greater accountability, particularly in countries or regions where women and girls fare poorly in terms of gender norms and development outcomes.

The resource describes each of the indices in detail, exploring in narrative and in the form of charts with specifics, how they can be used to help us analyse the discriminatory gender norms that affect adolescent girls. very briefly:

1. Developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the SIGI measures discrimination against women in social institutions (formal and informal laws, social norms, and practices) across 160 countries. It covers 5 dimensions of discriminatory social institutions and is comprised of 3 main components: (i) country profiles containing comprehensive qualitative information on legal, cultural, and traditional laws and practices; (ii) the Gender, Institutions and Development Database (GID-DB), comprising 33 indicators on gender discrimination in social institutions for which there are 3 rounds of data; and (iii) the index, classifying 108 countries into 5 categories according to their level of discrimination in social institutions.
2. Based on countries ranked by the Human Development Index (HDI), the GII was introduced in 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Human Development Report. The GII shows the gap in potential human development due to gender inequalities across 3 dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status.
3. Developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the GGGI measures gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities rather than the actual levels of available resources and opportunities. It gives us a snapshot of the different outcomes for men and women in relation to basic rights such as health, education, economic participation, and political empowerment. It covers 144 countries for which it has disaggregated data, though not all indicators are available for all countries.
4. AGEI was created in 2015 by the African Development Bank to measure gender inequality and promote equal development, and as of this writing covers 52 of Africa's 54 countries. It scores countries for each of the 3 dimensions (see Figure 3) as well as providing an overall score, which determines the country's ranking.
5. Developed by the UN's Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the AGDI has 2 parts: the quantitative Gender Status Index (GSI) and the qualitative African Women's Progress Scoreboard (AWPS). AGDI is designed to enable policymakers to assess how well they are doing in implementing policies and programmes geared towards ending women's marginalisation.

The next section provides an assessment of how the 5 indices can help monitor and analyse the situation of women and adolescent girls. It also suggests ways in which the indices could be strengthened to make them even more useful for analysing changes in gender norms that affect adolescent girls over time and in different contexts. For example, 3 of the indices - SIGI, GGGI, and AGDI - have innovated to include qualitative as well as quantitative indicators, which can be useful in capturing nuances around particularly sensitive issues such as domestic violence, sexual and reproductive health, and harmful traditional practices. The SIGI is the most relevant index for undertaking an analysis of the discriminatory gender norms that affect women, but, if it included more age-disaggregated indicators, it would yield significantly more insights on how gender norms affect adolescent girls. There is complementarity between the SIGI and other gender outcome indices, as illustrated by Table 1, which gives the index values and rankings for the 2014 SIGI, the 2014 GGGI, the 2013 GII, and the 2013 HDI for 4 countries: Argentina, Lebanon, Rwanda, and Yemen. These were purposely chosen because they are at different ends of the spectrum in terms of their SIGI and HDI values and show how the relation between indices plays out.

Finally, the note asks: How can data from these 5 gender indices be used to best effect?Looking ahead, the suggestion is that national statistical agencies need to invest more resources in gathering sex- and age-disaggregated data, as well as data on adolescent girls as a specific cohort. The Adolescent Girls Vulnerability Index, which uses global data sets to take a close look at how girls are faring in one country (Uganda), shows how gender indices could be used to benchmark and monitor the situation of adolescent girls in individual countries, across regions, and globally. "This could serve as a useful tool to encourage governments in lower-performing countries to make specific efforts to promote the wellbeing of adolescent girls, both for the sake of girls themselves and because of the significant developmental benefits from enhancing girls' wellbeing."