Scientists have invented a new way of measuring gender equality and claimed it shows men are more disadvantaged than women in most developed countries.

Researchers from the University of Missouri and University of Essex in the United Kingdom said previous ways of measuring inequality are ‘biased to highlight women’s issues’.

Their Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI) instead measures three factors: educational opportunities, healthy life expectancy and overall life satisfaction.

The academics calculated scores for 134 nations and used the results to suggest men are more disadvantaged than women in 91 nations.

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They discovered that the most developed nations in the world came ‘closest to achieving gender equality, albeit with a slight advantage for women’.

However, in the least developed countries, women fall behind men because they don’t have access to education.

Using the index, Bahrain was named as the top nation for gender equality followed by the UK and the Netherlands.

The US was ranked in position 34, with men falling behind in education as well as life expectancy and satisfaction.

Most European countries with the exception of Italy were deemed to be better for women than men.

Equality in the UK ‘Gender inequality: Great Britain has a relatively low level of gender inequality. Gender differences in life satisfaction are negligible. Men fall somewhat behind in years of secondary education, while they fall more than 3.3% behind in healthy life expectancy (70 years for men and 72 years for women in the 2012-2016 period). ‘How to improve: Most potential for improvement lies in the area of healthy life expectancy. Currently, Great Britain has a national health strategy for women, but not for men. Creating a national health strategy for men has the potential to make a real difference. The knowledge and skills needed to run a gender-specific health strategy are available in Great Britain. Further, a greater focus on the education gap is needed. The BIGI only looks at years of education, but the reality is that boys do not achieve as well as girls in the time they attend school (this starts already in pre-school).’

“With the BIGI, we are focusing on issues that are important to all women and men in any nation, regardless of level of economic and political development, and by including factors that can disadvantage men as well as women,’ said David Geary, who is Curators’ distinguished professor of psychological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science

‘Current equality measures are generally biased to highlight women’s issues and thus are not really measures of gender equality.’

‘We calculated BIGI scores for 134 nations, representing 6.8 billion people.

‘Surprisingly, our new measure indicated that men are, on average, more disadvantaged than women in 91 countries compared with a relative disadvantage for women in 43 countries.

‘We sought to correct the bias toward women’s issues in existing measures and at the same time develop a simple measure that is useful in any country in the world, regardless of their level of economic development.’

Gender equality in the US

Equality in the US ‘Gender inequality: Given its wealth and very high level of human development, its BIGI score is surprisingly low. Men fall behind in all three BIGI indicators. In regard to healthy life expectancy, the gap is nearly 5% (68 years for men and 71 years for women in the 2012-2016 period). ‘How to improve: Initiatives focusing on men’s access to (or use of) health care, as well as those focusing on boys’ education and health might help to address the current inequalities.’

The new measure has thrown up some strange results. For instance, it rated Saudi Arabia as having a high level of ‘gender parity’, which suggests men and women live reasonably equal lives.

This is because of a 7% disadvantage for women in education and a 5% disadvantage for men in life satisfaction.

But in 2016, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report placed Saudi Arabia at a dismal 141 out of 144 countries for gender parity.

The researchers said the gravest disadvantage facing men was often heath, particularly in countries with high levels of alcohol consumption, which tends to lower men’s lifespan.

For women, the disadvantages are strongly related to education.

‘No existing measure of gender inequality fully captures the hardships that are disproportionately experienced by men and so they do not fully capture the extent to which any nation is promoting the well-being of all its citizens,’ said Gijsbert Stoet, professor of psychology at the University of Essex.

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‘The BIGI provides a much simpler way of tackling gender inequality and it focuses on aspects of life that are directly relevant to all people.

‘Internationally, improvements in gender parity may be reached by focusing on education in the least developed nations and by focusing on preventative health care in medium and highly developed nations.’