Gender Empowerment Measure
Also known as: GEM, UNDP Gender Empowerment Measure
The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) is a UNDP composite introduced in the 1995 Human Development Report to capture gender inequality in agency and opportunity rather than in basic capabilities. It combines women's and men's shares of parliamentary seats, of senior administrative and managerial as well as professional and technical positions, and their relative earned income, aggregating them into an index that emphasises participation in economic and political decision-making.
Key highlights
- Directly targets agency and decision-making power rather than basic capabilities, filling a gap left by capability indices.
- Penalises imbalance in each dimension through an inequality-averse equally distributed equivalent rather than a simple average.
- Combines political, occupational, and economic dimensions of empowerment in a single comparable figure.
- Provided an internationally comparable empowerment series from 1995 through the late 2000s for trend analysis.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the GEM, or read historical GEM series, when the question is about women's access to power and economic opportunity rather than basic well-being — political voice, leadership positions, and command over income. It complements capability measures such as the GDI. In current practice the UNDP has retired the GEM in favour of the Gender Inequality Index, so for ongoing monitoring the GII is preferred; the GEM remains relevant for historical analysis and for studies specifically about decision-making representation.
Strengths & limitations
- Directly targets agency and decision-making power rather than basic capabilities, filling a gap left by capability indices.
- Penalises imbalance in each dimension through an inequality-averse equally distributed equivalent rather than a simple average.
- Combines political, occupational, and economic dimensions of empowerment in a single comparable figure.
- Provided an internationally comparable empowerment series from 1995 through the late 2000s for trend analysis.
- It is biased toward elite outcomes — parliamentary, managerial, and professional positions — and says little about empowerment among ordinary women.
- It conflates absolute income levels with gender balance, so richer countries can score higher partly because of wealth, not equality.
- The occupational categories rely on national data of uneven quality and comparability across countries.
- It was retired by the UNDP after 2009 amid critiques, so recent figures are not produced on the original basis.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Why did the UNDP stop producing the GEM?
Sustained methodological critique — notably from Stephan Klasen and colleagues — showed that the GEM mixed the level of income with gender balance, was biased toward elite positions, and relied on patchy occupational data. The UNDP responded in 2010 by introducing the Gender Inequality Index, which addressed several of these concerns, and discontinued the GEM and the original GDI.
How does the GEM differ from the GDI?
The GDI (in its 1995 form) adjusted the Human Development Index for gender gaps in basic capabilities — health, education, and living standards. The GEM instead measured agency and opportunity: political representation, managerial and professional participation, and command over income. The GDI was about whether women and men are equally well-off; the GEM was about whether women share power and economic decision-making.
What is the equally distributed equivalent percentage?
It is a generalised mean of the female and male shares within a dimension, computed with an inequality-aversion parameter so that imbalance between the sexes lowers the value. With equal population shares it behaves much like a harmonic mean scaled to a base of fifty. The device is what makes the GEM penalise a society where, say, men hold the overwhelming majority of seats, rather than rewarding the high average that a simple sum would give.
Sources
- 1.United Nations Development Programme (1995). Human Development Report 1995 — Gender and Human Development. Oxford University Press / UNDP.
- 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.
- 3.Klasen, S. (2006). UNDP's gender-related measures: Some conceptual problems and possible solutions. Journal of Human Development, 7(2), 243–274.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Gender Empowerment Measure. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/gender-studies/gender-empowerment-measure