Beyond income Any comprehensive assessment of inequality must consider income and wealth. But it must also go beyond dollars and rupees to understand differences in other aspects of human development and the processes that lead to them. There is economic inequality, of course, but there are also inequalities in key elements of human development such as health, education, dignity and human rights. Chapter 1 shows that the world is expected to reach 2030 with preventable gaps in infant mortality, out-of-school children and extreme income poverty. Drawing on granular data to zoom in on geographic areas, it documents overlapping deprivations and intersectional exclusions. Finally, the chapter zooms out on the dynamics of risk—health, natural disaster or conflict shocks that expose groups or individuals to added vulnerability. Behind these patterns lie the stubborn challenge of strengthening the capabilities of those furthest behind. Chapter 2 shows that inequalities in human development often accumulate through life, frequently heightened by deep power imbalances. Understanding inequality—even income inequality—means homing in on the underlying processes that lead to it. Different inequalities interact, while their size and impact shift over a person’s lifetime. Inequalities can start before birth, and many of the gaps may compound over a person’s life. When that happens, it can lead to self-perpetuating engines of increasing disadvantage. This can happen in several ways, especially in the nexus among health, education and parents’ socioeconomic status. Beyond averages

Beyond averages Too often the debate about inequality is oversimplified, relying on summary measures of inequality and incomplete data that provide a partial—sometimes misleading—picture, both in the sorts of inequality to consider and the people affected. The analysis must go beyond averages that collapse information on distribution to a single number a look at the ways inequality plays out across an entire population, in different places and over time. Assessing inequalities in human development demands a revolution in metrics to fill the many data gaps to measure these different inequalities and, more generally, to go systematically beyond averages. For income and wealth inequality the progress over the past few years has been remarkable. But data remain scarce, in part because of the lack of transparency and the low availability of information. On a new index presented in this Report, 88 countries score 1 or less (on a 20-point scale) for availability of information on income and wealth inequality—meaning that they have 5 percent or less of what would be an ideal level of transparency. Innovative work—some experimental—is unfolding. Chapter 3 presents results based on the Distributional National Accounts methodology which could integrate, in an overarching agenda, improvements to the System of National Accounts and strengthen household surveys and administrative data. The methodology reveals dynamics of income inequality that are masked when using summary measures that rely on a single data source. Gender inequality Some groups of people are systematically disadvantaged in many ways, the largest worldwide is undoubtedly women. Gender disparities are among the most entrenched forms of inequality everywhere and one of the greatest barriers to human development. Inequality is still sharp in the power men and women exercise at home, in the workplace or in politics. Social and cultural norms often foster behaviour and biases that perpetuate such inequalities. These biases follow a pattern: They tend to be more intense in the areas where more power is involved. And there is backlash, as the proportion of people biased against gender equality has grown over the last few years, even though there are different patterns across countries. Bias against gender equality is on the rise: The share of both women and men worldwide with no gender social norms bias fell between 2009 and 2014 Percent of surveyed population responding with biases towards gender equality and women’s empowerment Indicated bias in one or less questions from the World Values Survey Female Male 44 40 31 29 Indicated bias in two or more questions from the World Values Survey Female Male 57 60 69 71 Beyond income Beyond today