Global Gender Gap Report II: Women's Longer Lifespans = Anti-woman
November 4th, 2009 by Robert Franklin, Esq.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?
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November 4th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Robert wrote: "Got that?"
No. ;-)
November 4th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
It goes to show you can't trust statistics. For example: Where I live, a number of years ago, the police brought in photo radar, 6 months later they proudly trotted out numbers that proved a decrease in the issuance of speeding tickets. therefor Photo radar was working. EXCEPT, they never mention that the decrease took place during the months of Sept - March, when it was snow and hazardous weather that slowed folks down, NOT, as the government would have us believe, the photo radar. (crafty buggers). I know this has nothing to do with Gender equality, but it does act as an example of how statistic can be skewed to comply to ones own agenda.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
This kind of disingenuousness reminds of a report that I once heard second-hand about a supposed wrestling tournament between Soviet and American teams, won by the Americans. Supposedly, the reporting of the tournament went like this in the Soviet Union:
"The Soviets finished second. The Americans finished next to last."
November 4th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Well, I guess this proves that abortion should be illegal. All the feminists should start burning down the clinics. Or maybe just bombarding them with all their extra shoes. Either works.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Simply amazing twists of logic to come up with their pre-determined answers from this "study".
November 4th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
This type of 'study' and manipulation of the stats is common, for those that don't understand what they did here, I will explain
Lets use and analogy:
You are trying to determine which fruit , apples or oranges last longer before spoiling. If you used their method , this is how I would do it and what answer I would come up with.
I have 3 apples and 1 orange. I let them sit in the fridge until they spoil and I record the length of time
The apples spoiled in 1 day, the orange spoils in 2 days. So, not what I do is this.
I add up the number of APPLE days before spoiling which is 3 days, 1 apple x 1 day per apple = 3 apple days.
I then add up the number of orange days, which is 2 days , 1 orange times 2 days.
So this means oranges spoil faster as 2 is less than 3.
They did something similar, they took the number of minutes ALL women have been on the planet vs the number of minutes all men have been on the planet and added them up and of course since there are less women, WOMEN as a group spend LESS time on the planet.
Of course to anyone it "should" be obvious how stupid this is.
November 4th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
The authors have manipulated the data in such a way that equality can never be achieve unless women have adecided advantage. You showed this in you first post. I particularly liked the basketball analogy. I have another example.
Imagine a country that is totally dominated by women. One where men have no rights. Men are considered to be the property of women, are slaves, are not permitted to vote or hold public office, and receive no health care or education beyond the primary level where it is stressed so that the slaves will have the ability to perform required tasks. If this imaginary country had been included in the study, the authors would have concluded that women have still not achieved equality with men and that they still suffer from an anti-female gender gap. Here's how:
Being slaves, male participation in the workforce would be nearly 100%. Women's employment would not approach that figure therefore in the category of Economic Participation the score would be less than 1 which would indicate a female disadvantage. By stressing primary edication for boys could result in greater participation levels and greater literacy rates. Therefore the score for Educational Achievement would also be less than 1, again indicating female disadvantage. Since women would likely have the advantage in the areas of Political Empoerment and Health and Survival, the scores for these categories would be 1, indicating equality. Averaging the scores of the four categories would result in an overall score for this country of less than 1, indicating that women have not achieved equality with men and are the victims of an anti-female gender gap. The good news is this country would would likely top the list for gender equality and be held out as a model for other countries to emulate.
November 4th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
The folks with an agenda will use any pretext to attack males. But you see not all males are being attacked..equally!!
November 4th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I'm reminded of the joke: Why do husbands die before their wives? Because they want to.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Very well written, Robert.
The logical conclusion to this report is that women would be better dying early.
Except can you imagine the yelping if men actually lived longer than women? I think men would gladly take the shorter lifespan than to be forced to listen to that.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
if men lived longer we would never hear the end of it...
November 4th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
No mather what happens, women have to be victims.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
If more baby boys are born than baby girls due to aborition,
And the fact that more girls are aborted he boys is proof of discrimination against women
And abortion is a legal right avaliblel only to women,
Then isnt it women who are being Anti-woman when they engage in abortion?
And if women are engaging in 'anti-woman' behavior is it really anti-woman behavior?
November 4th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Women's Longer Lifespans = Anti-woman
Yes.. It is part of an elaborate system of "oppression." We need more laws to protect women and children from oppressive men... Everything is anti woman even things in women's favor is anti woman...
November 4th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
lujlp,
In china, it is not really clear whether boys being "allowed to live" to "carry the family weight" or female infanticide (declared as stillborn) because the govt allows only one child = being anti-female behavior. It is a rational choice that parents are forced to make under the gun of the govt there (for the "common good", I am sure!).
But is being born a privilege/advantage, if you are going to be regarded as the family retirement/welfare check?
November 5th, 2009 at 6:27 am
The natural birth ratio is 105 boys to 100 girls (about 95.2 girls per 100 boys). Therefore about 2/3 of the discrepancy is natural. Women may well have less access to healthcare in many parts of the world, but the methodological approach of this report is completely bogus. Instead of listing and evaluating the various health factors, women are assumes to be unequal, so they are assigned a score to prove this, merely by dint of being female.
Completely circular!
November 5th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
gah, do I have to esplain this to you?
Women's lives suck SOOOO much more than mens, that the extra 10 years they're forced to live are unbearable. Imagine how depressing it would be to realize every day that you've got 10 moar years of teh suck, simply because you were unfortunate enough to be born a woman!
How Awful! Poor things!
We must tax men at a higher rate, because they're not going to live long enough to otherwise pay society back for the misery they'll inflict during their abbreviated, nasty lives!