The Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations Development Programme is probably the best know international ranking that compares human wellbeing across countries. And it hides a sexist lie.

The HDI is a fairly simple composite index made from only three metrics:

  1. the life expectancy,
  2. years of schooling and
  3. national income per capita (the PPP type_per_capita)).

The idea is that each metric stands as a proxy for a myriad of other factors. For instance, the life expectancy tells a story not only about your country's healthcare system, but also about suicide rates, about protection from occupational hazards, about levels of air pollution and ecology, etc. You get it.

The HDI is also calculated separately for women and men, and this is where things get nasty. I was surprised to see that for many countries the HDI-female index is lower than the HDI-male index even when I would expect the opposite. Let's take for instance the US: the HDI-female 0.922 is lower than HDI-male 0.928, while it is known that men in the US underachieve in education and live shorter. And indeed, the detailed country profile shows that Life expectancy at birth for men and women is 76.3 and 81.4 years respectively and similarly, the Expected years of schooling for men and women are 15.7 and 16.9 years respectively. How is it then possible that men are more developed than women? I dug deeper and I indeed found the answer:

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Human Development Report Office estimates based on female and male shares of the economically active population, the ratio of the female to male wage in all sectors and gross national income in 2017 purchasing power parity (PPP) terms[...]

Source: Technical notes - Calculating the human development indices

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Whatever that tortuous sentence means, the outcome is this: The US Gross National Income (GNI) per capita is $63,826. From this, the Development Report Office *estimated\* that GNI per capita of men and women is $77,338 and $50,590 respectively.

Let that sink.

That is a mere 65%, a far cry even from the notorious 80 cent per dollar of unadjusted(!) pay gap. Not only is that number completely unreal, the context is completely twisted. Gross National Income is not synonymous with wages and the HDI is supposed to measure human development, not disposable income. Even if individual women earn less, within marriage they have typically access to the same wealth as men. And outside of marriage they receive the same public services as men, be it infrastructure, social benefits, legal protection and security, and (outside of US) also the mentioned education and healthcare. Everything the government provides is measured by the Gross National Income, not your individual wage.

This "discrepancy" is not limited to the US index. The Development Report Office's *estimates\* are preposterous everywhere we look. Italy, for instance, has one of the smallest unadjusted(!) pay gaps in the world (just 5.5%), yet the HDI says that Italian women have GNI only 58% that of Italian men. The worst off are probably Indian women with estimated GNI only 22% of that of Indian men, banishing them from official Indian $6,681 per capita to the Afghanistan level of $2,331. Yet, despite figuratively living in a war-torn country, the brave Indian women manage to study more years and live healthier and longer lives than their spoiled men. I know, right?

Unfortunately the story does not end here. Besides the HDI, the United Nations' Human Development Report Office also compiles the Gender Inequality Index (GII).

Before I continue, allow me to make a shoutout to probably the most sexist mainstream index - the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report - that is notorious for manipulating numbers to show only disadvantage by design, and assessing that parity between men and women is achieved when men die 6% sooner than women. Yep, men dying only 4 years sooner is considered oppression of women.

Back to the GII. Wikipedia has interesting chapter on the origin of the index. TL;DR, two other indexes - Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) - were introduced in the 1995, but compared to the above mentioned Global Gender Gap Report they were not showing enough, ehm, oppression. So the two were discontinued and replaced by the GII. According to GGI, women in given country suffer from inequality, if:

  • There is high Maternal Mortality Ratio) (regardless of the general level of healthcare in given country).
  • There is high level of teenage pregnancy (regardless of the level of poverty or child labour in given country).
  • They hold less than fair share of parliamentary seats or have less than fair share of higher education attainment levels (although this measures the equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, at least the numbers in here can have positive value, unlike the Global Gender Gap Report that only counts negative values by design).
  • They have less than fair share of participation in the workforce (again, this is a measure of the equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. But more importantly, because only women can bear children, certain level of inequality in workforce participation is unavoidable and does not mean inequality between sexes in society).

And that is it. The index does not include any other dimensions that would reflect women's advantages in society. I mean, men suffer almost all occupational fatalities, often have to work longer than women to earn their retirement, and then they die - but hey, in the GII that counts as inequality of women!

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This may seems just like another piece of misandry in a long list of untruths that permeate the mainstream discourse on gender and equality. But I think men's rights activists should pay special attention to these indexes. The MRA crowd is often frustrated by what we perceive as canceling, censorship or general inability to get our voice heard in the mainstream. But from the side of a neutral uninformed observer things may seem confusing - the MRAs have interesting stories and anecdotal evidence, but there is this hard evidence in the form of indexes published by the likes of UN and World Economic Forum that clearly shows that women suffer all kinds of underdevelopments, inequalities and gaps, even in areas labeled by MRAs as male issues.

Here is the solution: We need uncorrupted scholars to publish on the shortcomings of these indexes. We need activists to mention that criticism on wikipedia pages of those indexes. We need sincere non-profits to publish refined versions of those same indexes and we all need to stubbornly repeat that there is a scientific evidence of men facing their own issues.