Towards an Optimal Synthetic Index for Measuring Gender Inequality

Gender equality is a key aspect of human rights in order to achieve sustainability and development focused on people. Bearing in mind how important equality has become in decision making, indicators including the gender approach are useful for quantifying the differences between the two genders and how they have evolved over time. Taking gender into account brings a diverse and complex reality into play which, in order to analyse accurately, entails distinguishing between various approaches and technical alternatives. This paper presents modelling, understood as creating a simplified recreation of a complex reality, as the most suitable framework. A thorough analysis of recent literature reveals serious limitations, thus leading to the need to further research in areas such as the adaptation of empirical indicators to the theoretical framework, the expression applied when calculating simple indicators, the process used when rescaling them for normalisation purposes, the average used to obtain a synthetic index and the methods used to assign weights to integrated simple indicators. We have focused our research on these aspects, analysing and contrasting different alternatives, particularly focusing on ascertaining the most accurate methodology to attain a synthetic gender indicator, as a way of analysing these phenomena.