Global Gender Gap Report II: Women’s Longer Lifespans = Anti-woman
I've blogged before about the Global Gender Gap Report for 2009. Here's a link to it (WEForum, 2009). I won't repeat the tedious explanations of what it claims to be or its frankly anti-male scoring system. If you want to read about that, click here.
The Global Gender Gap Report is at pains to avoid any admission that men may fare worse than women in some parts of the world or in certain aspects of life. So in addition to defining anti-male bias as "equality" (see my previous post on the subject), it carefully chooses categories in which men tend to outperform women. In other words, it addresses areas in which it can demonstrate anti-female inequality and scrupulously ignores those in which it can't.
Therefore, you won't find categories entitled "Killed in War," "Killed on the Job," "Homeless," "Incarceration," etc. You won't find any references to disparities in child custody, sentencing for crime or crime victimization. Military impressment of boys as young as eight likewise gets a pass. And of course you will find statistics for things like female genital mutilation which, from my perspective, is barbaric, but is also unknown to the vast majority of women and girls in the world.
Still, try as they might, apparently the authors couldn't avoid certain categories in which men's outcomes are worse than women's. One is education, and in that category they simply define any anti-male inequality as equality and let it go at that (see my previous post).
But health is another category they apparently felt they couldn't leave out, and inconveniently for the authors, men tend to have shorter lifespans than do women. Indeed, according to the report itself, the ratio of women's lifespans to those of men is 1.04, meaning that, on average worldwide, women live longer than do men. So the authors were presented with a problem - how to spin better female health as worse female health.
Not to worry, though; they were more than equal to the task.
They divided the category Health and Survival into two subcategories and gave each a weighting. The first subcategory is life expectancy, which is an obvious measurement to use when rating health.
But strangely enough the second subcategory is sex at birth. Now, what precisely does the sex of a child at birth have to tell us about its health? Not anything that I can see. Of course boy babies are statistically likely to live shorter lives than are girl babies, but that's captured in the subcategory for life expectancy. So what gives?
More to the point, why do the authors accord that second subcategory more than twice the weight (0.693 : 0.307) they give to life expectancy? The answer should be obvious; they do that in order to arrive at an overall score for Health and Survival that indicates anti-female inequality.
That's because in many countries, there are more boys born than girls. (The overall ratio of girl babies to boy babies is 0.93)In a few countries like China, that's because female fetuses are often aborted due to a preference for boys. Somehow, in the authors' minds, that has something to do with the health and survival of living children and adults, which it transparently does not, but they needed something with which to overbalance women's greater longevity. Apparently that's the best they could do.
(As an aside, I'd point out that, in many countries in the West, abortion is not only legal but a woman's right. That means that, in the legal systems of those countries, a fetus is given less moral and legal standing than is a person who's been born. Roe v. Wade, for example, makes that clear. But in the scheme of the Global Gender Gap Report, the opposite is true - the unborn, or at least unborn girls, are statistically given over twice the importance of those already born.)
Given the radically-unequal, and inexplicable, weighting given to the two subcategories, the fact that men live shorter lives than women is easily overbalanced by even minor statistical differences in percentages of girls and boys at birth. And presto, the fact that fewer girls are born than boys magically obscures the fact that women live longer than men.
On the planet most of us occupy, how long you live is surely the most important single factor in assessing "health and survival." But for the authors of the Global Gender Gap Report it's what sex you are. Fewer girls at birth mean poorer women's health even though they live longer than men. Got that?
|
| More from Robert Franklin, Esq.
Stumble It!
