I understand what you’re after, but I haven’t seen a tidy way of converting improvements in gender equality to an all-up measure of well-being or income. That’s partly for the reasons that David T states that gender equality is multi-faceted, plus if downstream benefits materialize gradually, they are hard to empirically isolate and quantify. In addition, promoting equality isn’t just about the instrumental benefits like better use of human talent --> higher GDP, but also equality of opportunity being valuable per se, even if not exercised. I think if you tried to use standard methods to put a dollar value on rights, e.g., elicited women’s WTP for equal rights, you wouldn’t get a very informative answer. If someone asked me how much I value my right to free speech or freedom of religion, I would have nothing to anchor my answer and suspect it would be mostly noise. In addition, preferences adapt to circumstances. In some of my other work in India (see last paragraph of section 4.3), many women with extremely limited financial say in their household said they didn’t want any more say than they had, and that men should control those decisions. I’m skeptical of taking that response at face value and concluding that increasing women’s very low agency would not be welfare-improving for them.
That’s going to be difficult to untangle, because improvements to some aspects like educational opportunities and shifts in generational attitudes take time to pay dividends and the causality plausibly runs both ways. Half the population is offered direct wellbeing improvements and the overall economic impact of education increased workforce participation is generally positive, but also countries most successful in tackling gender inequality tend to be ones that have already experienced positive trends in their development.
And also, of course, because there are a lot of different measures of gender equality and human wellbeing.
Countries which already have higher gender equality tend to do a lot better in HDI indicators and somewhat better in subjective wellbeing indicators, but there are obviously many other factors at play.
Can you tell us about how strongly changes in gender equality predict changes in measures of human wellbeing?
I understand what you’re after, but I haven’t seen a tidy way of converting improvements in gender equality to an all-up measure of well-being or income. That’s partly for the reasons that David T states that gender equality is multi-faceted, plus if downstream benefits materialize gradually, they are hard to empirically isolate and quantify. In addition, promoting equality isn’t just about the instrumental benefits like better use of human talent --> higher GDP, but also equality of opportunity being valuable per se, even if not exercised. I think if you tried to use standard methods to put a dollar value on rights, e.g., elicited women’s WTP for equal rights, you wouldn’t get a very informative answer. If someone asked me how much I value my right to free speech or freedom of religion, I would have nothing to anchor my answer and suspect it would be mostly noise. In addition, preferences adapt to circumstances. In some of my other work in India (see last paragraph of section 4.3), many women with extremely limited financial say in their household said they didn’t want any more say than they had, and that men should control those decisions. I’m skeptical of taking that response at face value and concluding that increasing women’s very low agency would not be welfare-improving for them.
That’s going to be difficult to untangle, because improvements to some aspects like educational opportunities and shifts in generational attitudes take time to pay dividends and the causality plausibly runs both ways. Half the population is offered direct wellbeing improvements and the overall economic impact of education increased workforce participation is generally positive, but also countries most successful in tackling gender inequality tend to be ones that have already experienced positive trends in their development.
And also, of course, because there are a lot of different measures of gender equality and human wellbeing.
Countries which already have higher gender equality tend to do a lot better in HDI indicators and somewhat better in subjective wellbeing indicators, but there are obviously many other factors at play.