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Gender Development Index

Also known as: GDI, Gender-related Development Index, UNDP Gender Development Index

OriginatorUNDP Human Development Report OfficeYear1995Sources3Related methods8

The Gender Development Index (GDI) is a UNDP composite that measures gender gaps in human development by computing the Human Development Index separately for women and men and expressing the female value as a ratio of the male value. First introduced as the Gender-related Development Index in the 1995 Human Development Report and redesigned in 2014, it covers the same three dimensions as the HDI — a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living — and reports how far female human development falls short of, or exceeds, male human development.

Key highlights

  • Expresses the gender gap on the same intuitive scale as the widely understood Human Development Index.
  • Decomposable by dimension, since the female and male HDIs can be compared component by component.
  • Computed for a large set of countries by the UNDP, supporting consistent comparison and trend analysis.
  • The 2014 grouping by absolute deviation from parity guards against over-reading negligible differences.

Intuition

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How it works

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When to use it

Use the GDI when you want to express gender disparity directly in the familiar terms of the Human Development Index, for instance to accompany a country's HDI with a statement of how equally that development is shared. It is well suited to high-level monitoring and communication. It is less suitable as a standalone inequality measure: it is a ratio of absolute achievements rather than an inequality-penalising index like the GII, and its income component relies on strong imputation assumptions where sex-disaggregated earnings data are missing.

Strengths & limitations

Strengths
  • Expresses the gender gap on the same intuitive scale as the widely understood Human Development Index.
  • Decomposable by dimension, since the female and male HDIs can be compared component by component.
  • Computed for a large set of countries by the UNDP, supporting consistent comparison and trend analysis.
  • The 2014 grouping by absolute deviation from parity guards against over-reading negligible differences.
Limitations
  • It is a ratio of achievement levels, not an inequality-penalising index, so it does not capture the cost of inequality the way the GII does.
  • The estimated earned income component depends heavily on imputation where sex-disaggregated wage data are unavailable.
  • Like the HDI it omits many dimensions of well-being and disparity, including unpaid work, violence, and political voice.
  • A GDI near one can mask offsetting gaps — for example women ahead in education but behind in income.

Common pitfalls

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Applications

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Frequently asked

How is the GDI different from the Gender Inequality Index?

The GDI is a ratio of the female and male Human Development Indices — it compares absolute achievement levels in health, education, and income. The GII instead measures the loss of potential development caused by inequality, using an association-sensitive aggregation across different indicators (including reproductive health and parliamentary representation). The GDI answers 'how do women's and men's development levels compare?' while the GII answers 'how much does gender inequality cost?'.

Can the GDI exceed 1?

Yes. A GDI above one means the female HDI exceeds the male HDI, which happens in a number of countries, typically because women's life expectancy and schooling exceed men's by enough to outweigh income gaps. The 2014 country grouping classifies countries by the absolute distance from one, so a value of 1.05 and a value of 0.95 represent the same magnitude of gap in opposite directions.

Why was the GDI redesigned in 2014?

The original Gender-related Development Index combined the gender gap with the level of development in a single adjusted figure, which made it easy to misread as a standalone gender measure and hard to interpret. The 2014 redesign separated the two: it computes a full HDI for each sex and reports their ratio, so the gap is transparent and the GDI complements rather than duplicates the HDI and the GII.

Sources

  1. 1.
    United Nations Development Programme (2014). Human Development Report 2014 — Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience (Technical Note on the Gender Development Index). UNDP.
    https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-2014
  2. 2.
    Klugman, J., Rodríguez, F., & Choi, H.-J. (2011). The HDI 2010: New controversies, old critiques. The Journal of Economic Inequality, 9(2), 249–288.
    DOI 10.1007/s10888-011-9178-z
  3. 3.
    United Nations Development Programme (1995). Human Development Report 1995 — Gender and Human Development. Oxford University Press / UNDP.
    https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-1995

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ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Gender Development Index. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/gender-studies/gender-development-index