Why is income not included in the BIGI? After all, the total income of all women is lower than the total income of men, should that not matter? This is explained in detail in the PloS One article about BIGI, please read it here.

There are far fewer women than men in high-level politics (e.g., national parliament, heads of government, etc) and company boards. Why is this not considered in the BIGI? There are different reasons for not including this variable (see paper). One of the main arguments is that the number of people in high level politics (or on company boards) is extremely small, and thus, irrelevant to the majority of men and women in a society.

Once you start including issues that affect a small group, you are faced with a selection problem. For example, if you include the gender gap in regard to politics, why not also include the gender gap in imprisonment?

After all, the number of prisoners is much larger than the number of politicians (and hence more relevant). Note, that roughly 95% of the prison population is male. A similar factor is the gender gap in occupational injuries/deaths and in regard to the most dangerous jobs, such as being mineworker or working in the construction sector.

To the best of our knowledge, no gender inequality scale takes these latter variables into account, which suggests a selection bias: Issues that are relevant to women ('s power and influence) take precedent over those that are relevant to men.

That makes of course absolutely no sense for a scale that is about gender equality — after all, both genders should be get equal consideration! In our opinion, most gender inequality scales have a biased selection. There are different ways of solving the selection problem. The way BIGI has solved the selection problem is by not including variables that only affect a small portion of the population.

How come that the BIGI score in Saudi Arabia is not showing a great disadvantage for women, given the restrictions for women that have been widely reported in the media? This is explained in detail in the PloS One article about BIGI, please read it here.

Why do women fall so much behind in terms of education in the poorest countries? This is explained in detail in the PloS One article about BIGI, please read it here.

Are you saying that given that gender inequality is not as one-sided in favor of men as the Global Gender Gap Report suggests? Indeed, we show that there are many countries with a relatively small deviation from gender parity. We believe that the Global Gender Gap Report is biased by ignoring societal problems that affect more men than women, which results in an unrealistically negative outlook for women. The reality is that both men and women are affected by societal issues, and that issues men and women face differently can cancel one another out.

Given that the situation is not as grim as the Global Gender Gap Report suggests, should we stop caring about gender inequality? No, because gender equality means that the situation for men and women is comparable, not that it is ideal. These are countries in which there are considerable problems in regard to gender inequality, but the problems of men and women cancel each other out (e.g., women falling behind in education while men falling behind in life expectancy and life satisfaction). Ideally, countries score well in all three subdomains. Bahrain comes close, although it is an unusual nation with a very small population, and thus difficult to compare to more diverse larger societies such as Great Britain.

Why does there seem to be a discrepancy in the case studies when reporting the actual healthy life expectancy and the percentage? At first sight, it seems there is a discrepancy, for example, we report for Britain that the healthy life expectancy for men is 70 and for women 72. Given that 70/72=0.972, followed by 0.972-1.0, you get -2.8%, and not the reported -3.3%. This happens because the reported -3.3% is the average of five divisions of each of the five years (71/73,71/73,70/72,69/72,69/72), and not the division of the averaged ages. Because of this you get different values.

Where did you get the data used to calculate BIGI? Data are taken from two sources for the 2012-2016 period. 1) The Global Gender Gap Reports published by the World Economic Forum. 2) Gallup World Poll data.

Who created the BIGI? The scale was developed by Professor Stoet (UK) and Professor Geary (US).