Gender Empowerment Measure

GEM is the United Nations Development Programme's attempt to measure the extent of gender inequality across the globe's countries, based on estimates of women's relative economic income, participation in high-paying positions with economic power, and access to professional and parliamentary positions.

[1] The GEM was designed to measure "whether women and men are able to actively participate in economic and political life and take part in decision-making" (UNDP, 1995, p. 73)(Klasen 257).

[2] The GEM is thought to be a valuable policy instrument because it allows certain dimensions that were previously difficult to compare between countries to come into international comparison.

[4] Inversely, countries with low GEM scores had higher rates of military spending, which correlate with traditional masculine values.

In 2011, Professors Sara C. Hitchman and Geoffrey T. Fong used the GEM in a study they conducted at the University of Waterloo entitled "Gender empowerment and female-to-male smoking prevalence ratios".

[1] Additionally, the GEM has been criticized for not taking into account the limitations on or differences in women's empowerment within certain religious and cultural contexts.

On the other hand, however, information regarding the number of parliamentary seats held by women is very easy to obtain, and very hard to alter, making it one of the more reliable sources of data in the measure.

[2] Other suggestions include coming up with different ways to deal with the earned income part so as to make it a more straightforward mode of measurement.

[9] In some developing countries where the aforementioned shortcomings of the GEM are especially pronounced, subnational calculations are made differently in order to produce a more accurate representation of women's empowerment.

[10] Thus many Indian states use local level parliamentary numbers when calculating their GEM and overall Human Development Reports (HDR).

[1] In 2003 Charmes and Wieringa came up with the Women's Empowerment Matrix which considers six spheres (physical, sociocultural, religious, political, legal and economic) as well as six levels: individual, household, community, state, regional, and global.

[2] Lastly, in the 2010 Human Development Report, a new measuring mechanism was created entitled the Gender Inequality Index.

This new experimental measure considers three dimensions: Reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation which aim to ameliorate some of the problems associated with the GEM.