Human Development Index and Status of Women

The development of nations cannot be determined based on income alone (Sen 1998). The annual Human Development Report (HDR) published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) gives the values for Human Development Index (HDI) as a measure of achievement of the nations in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment, and adjusted real income. The HDI is a widely used standardized measure of overall development within countries (Anand and Sen 2000). HDI is a weighted average of the per capita income, life expectancy, and level of education within a country that determines the level of deprivation of a country with respect to all other countries. The HDR contains aggregated data and data by gender on various aspects of development, such as life expectancies (at birth, at age 5, etc.), infant mortalities, literacy rates, economic participation rates, per capita income (expected or estimated incomes) in purchasing power parity dollars, gross enrollment rates, fertility rates, etc. from countries of the world. While the HDI gives an idea of the human development of nations, it fails to give an accurate picture of gender development across the countries of the world (Bardhan & Klasen 1999). Since the HDI takes only average aggregate values of economic and quality of life variables and does not take into account specific differences of development of males and females as separate populations, it is deficient as an index for a country’s level of comparative gender development. Thus, a revised approach to human development is needed to capture disparities between men and women. It is possible to carry out comparisons of different variables in the context of gender under the assumption that all countries contain approximately equal proportion of males and females. It follows that the differences of female to male rates for select variables possibly comprise a different aspect of development – gender development. The ultimate purpose of this research is to introduce an index that measures development to a country in terms of the equality in development of men and women that reside within it. Two hypotheses help us in achieving this goal. The first hypothesis is that the level of development of a country depends