COIN Open Day - UK Gender Equality Index

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Date of event: Thursday, September 19, 2024

Where: Online

Description: 

Despite significant progress over past decades, gender inequalities persist in the United Kingdom. Mounting evidence suggests that gender inequalities are experienced differently across local areas. For potential policy interventions to be effective, we need to understand the spatial variations in gender inequalities in the UK, especially given the country’s high levels of regional inequality. Yet to date, no comprehensive sub-national measurement of gender equality exists for the UK. 

The King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership is developing an UK Gender Equality Index to measure and map gender equality levels and their variation across local areas in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Index makes use of existing data measured on the Local Authority District level, covering 374 areas across the UK and covers six domains of women’s and men’s lives: paid work, unpaid work, money, power & participation, education, and health. 

The UK Gender Equality Index will be made up of three indices that allow us to address the tension between relative and absolute levels of equality using the same indicators in each version:

• The Gender Equality Index: measuring relative inequality between men and women,
• The Women’s Achievement Index: measuring women’s outcomes in a local authority relative to women’s outcomes in the highest performing local authority on a given indicator.
• The Men’s Achievement Index: measuring men’s outcomes in a local authority relative to men’s outcomes in the highest performing local authority on a given indicator. 

Societal impact:

 The UK Gender Equality Index holds great potential for societal impact by offering a monitoring tool for policy making, research, and advocacy that may help redress gender inequalities across the four nations. Its development comes as a critical time when the UK is facing multiple socio-economic crises, but also a General Election. The index and its future iterations will therefore provide an invaluable resource to benchmark gender equality levels and hold the next government to account in the future. 

Effective and tailored policies to address socio-economic inequalities rely on a strong evidence base. Given the UK’s high levels of regional inequality, understanding how gender outcomes may differ across local areas for different groups aligns with the UK principles enshrined in the Equality Act 2010, and is also critical to its Devolution and Levelling-up agendas. The UK Gender Equality Index addresses an urgent UK policy need for better evidence to inform these agendas by collating and harmonising numerous data sources in the UK. As such, the index showcases the rich UK data landscape while also improving its usability for better understanding gender inequalities and their spatial variation.

Further, the evidence base provided by the index can support local authorities in tailored policy making, budget allocation decisions, and Equality Impact Assessments. Ideally, it can improve dialogue between local authorities with comparable index scores to facilitate knowledge exchange of successful initiatives. Local and national advocacy groups will benefit from access to the integrated dataset that will be visualised on a user-friendly website, facilitating the interpretation of gender equality levels and their spatial distribution. This evidence base might support local campaigns and can be used in funding applications. The index results can be used by multidisciplinary social science researchers to further investigate the relationship between gender equality and other socio-economic outcomes such as deprivation, productivity, or the prevalence of violence. Finally, we see potential for the statistical agencies across the four nations to benefit as we aim to highlight the remaining data gaps preventing us from better understanding gender (and intersecting) inequalities and propose recommendations for improvement.