Around the World, Males Are Lagging Behind Females. Gender Equality Programs Need to Prioritize Men.

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Contact: Rebecca Hain

Telephone: +1-513-479-3335

Around the World, Males Are Lagging Behind Females. Gender Equality Programs Need to Prioritize Men.

April 26, 2023 – Over the last decade, UN Women and others have made the claim that special measures are necessary to address the unequal status of women and girls around the world. To support their assertion, feminist groups cite measures such as the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), which measures women’s economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, sex-ratio at birth and survival, and political attainment.

But the GGGI is biased because gender imbalances to the advantage of women do not affect the score. As the World Bank explains, the GGGI “neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men in particular indicators in some countries.” (1)

Obviously, any indicator of gender equality needs to be unbiased and fair to both men and women.

To overcome these deficiencies, researchers at the University of Missouri and the University of Essex developed the Basic Index of Gender Inequality (2). The BIGI measures the ratio of women to men on three dimensions:

Educational Opportunities in Childhood, as measured by the Human Development Index (3)
Healthy Life Expectancy
Overall Life Satisfaction, based on the Gallup World Poll (4)

Using the BIGI criteria, researchers evaluated 134 countries around the world. They found that overall, men are underperforming in 91 out of 134 countries. In contrast, women are lagging behind men in only 43 countries (5). Specifically:

Healthy Life Span: Except for Kuwait and Mali, men’s life spans are shorter than women’s.
Basic Education: In most countries with a high or very high Human Development Index score, males are lagging.
Overall Life Satisfaction: In many countries, men are less likely than women to express satisfaction with their lives.

In addition, men have higher suicide rates than women. “Globally, the age-standardized suicide rate was 1.8 times higher in males than in females,” reveals the World Health Organization (6). Likewise, domestic violence studies conducted around the world show that more males than females report being abuse victims in the past year (7).

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states emphatically, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” (Article 3) (8). The Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance urges the United Nations and Member-States to refocus their gender equality programs to accord priority attention to the needs of men.

The Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance – DAVIA — consists of 84 member organizations from 32 countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. DAVIA seeks to ensure that domestic violence and abuse polices are science-based, family-affirming, and sex-inclusive. https://endtodv.org/davia/

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