Lee Jeong-shim, the Director of the UN Women Centre of Excellence for Gender Equality in the Republic of Korea. (UN Women Centre of Excellence for Gender Equality)

By Lee Jeong-shim

How we measure national “progress” and “development” matters, including on gender equality. Without appropriate, realistic assessment of our achievements and remaining challenges, we cannot correctly identify necessary actions and priorities.

This is why in a new global report launched this week at the Women Deliver Conference in Rwanda, UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme jointly proposed and utilized two new indices for measuring gender parity and women’s empowerment: the Women's Empowerment Index (WEI) and the Global Gender Parity Index (GGPI).

The WEI measures women's power and freedoms to make choices and seize life opportunities across five dimensions: health, education, inclusion, decision-making and violence against women. Complementing the WEI, the GGPI evaluates the status of women relative to men in core dimensions of human development, including health, education, inclusion and decision-making.

Using the twin indices, the report analyzed 114 countries and found that less than 1 percent of women and girls live in a country with high women’s empowerment and high gender parity, while 1 billion women and girls — more than 90 percent of the world’s female population — live in countries characterized by low or middle performance on women’s empowerment and low or middle performance in achieving gender parity.

It also found that, as measured by the WEI, women globally are empowered to achieve on average only 60 percent of their full potential. On average, they achieve only 72 percent of what men achieve across key human development dimensions, as measured by the GPPI.

The report’s findings may not be too surprising to most of us who are used to the realities of gender inequality in various aspects of our lives and societies. Nevertheless, their ramifications are not trivial. The empowerment deficits and disparities not only affect women and girls, who make up half of humanity, but also harm human progress overall.

I believe these new indices provide complementary lenses to better capture the realities we face as humanity, and encourage all of us to accelerate the journey toward a more equitable and inclusive world.

Lee Jeong-shim is the Director of the UN Women Centre of Excellence for Gender Equality in the Republic of Korea. -- Ed.