The SIGI Background Paper
Instead of measuring gender inequalities in education, health, economic or political
participation and other dimensions, the SIGI measures social institutions that are
mirrored by societal practices and legal norms that produce inequalities between
women and men in non-OECD countries. Empirical results confirm that the SIGI
provides additional information to that of other well-known gender-related indices.
Methodologically, the SIGI is inspired by the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty
measures (Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke, 1984). It offers a new way of aggregating gender inequality in several dimensions, penalizing high inequality in each dimension. As a multidimensional measure, the SIGI allows only for partial compensation between dimensions. The five dimensions of social institutions related to gender inequality that are combined by the SIGI are Family code, Civil liberties, Physical integrity, Son Preference, and Ownership rights. These subindices are built using the method of polychoric PCA to extract the common information of the variables corresponding to a subindex.
