The United Nations development program is a program aimed and geared towards helping developing nations towards real development. Obviously development can't by any means take place without the presence of gender equality. In United Nations development program has developed two methods in order to measure both women's development as well as women's empowerment. The two conceptual indexes that measure women's development and their empowerment are the GDI and the GEM indexes. I do not believe that these indexes are accurate because they operate under a system of classification developed by the UNDP of levels subjective to only high, medium and low human development; unfairly this resulted in extremely low measures for Arab countries.
Primarily we must acknowledge that women should be expected to equally participate in the development process and to reciprocate the obvious benefits that come from this development. The real problem however is that the development policies have never offered an equal opportunity and equal benefits to women.
English: Relationship between Total Fertility Rate...
English: HDI (UN Human Development Index, 2010) ve...
English: 2010 HDI (Very High) nations graph by pop...The majority of policies neglect gender relations from either the planning, implementation, monitoring or even evaluation of the projects; based on this many developmental have failed. Even though the focus of this paper is on women, both gender based indexes measure the development and empowerment of both men and women, hence a gender based index not a female based index.
In essence the Gender development index is a measure for the achievement of both women and men in three important dimensions: life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income (after taking note of inequality between women and men). In essence the GDI is the HDI (Human development index) however taking into consideration gender inequalities. On another end the Gender empowerment index is one that focuses on three variables that reflect women's participation in political decision-making, access to professional opportunities and...