UN: The Political Wing of the Global Capitalist System

The UN has come up with a new Gender Inequality Index, stating in its introduction the shortcomings of its previous GEM and GDI measures. Here is what they state about their previous indexes and their "elite" bias:

"The GDI is not a measure of gender inequality; it is the HDI adjusted for gender disparities in its basic components and cannot be interpreted independently of the HDI. The difference between the HDI and the GDI appears to be small because the differences captured in the three dimensions tend to be small, giving a misleading impression that gender gaps are irrelevant. In addition, gender-disaggregated incomes have to be estimated in a very crude way using not so realistic assumptions due to the lack of income data by gender for over three-fourths of countries.

Both the GDI and GEM combined relative and absolute achievements. The earned income component uses both—the income level and the gender-disaggregated income shares. However, income levels tend to dominate the indexes, and as a result, countries with low income levels cannot achieve a high score even with perfect gender equality in the distribution of earnings and other components of the indexes. Also, nearly all of the GEM indicators reflect a strong elite bias making the measure more relevant for developed countries and urban elites in developing countries. Further, the indicators used as proxy do not correspond to the underlying concept." (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/gii/)

Going by what is acknowledged by the UN itself, it is safe to conclude that all those studies that have to date used the GDI and the GEM measures, are studies whose conclusions incorporate an "elite" bias.

The obvious shortcomings of this "new" index are also evident: they state " Reproductive health is the largest contributor to gender inequality", that is, most countries that show high inequality do so because of "reproductive health", which is another way of saying that their societies have have higher fertility- as is characteristic of agriculture-based societies due to structural precedent and lack of corresponding health care, leading to infant and maternal mortality, which are income and its distribution dependent and the position of the country within the World System and the strength and legitimacy of the state given that position in its ability to extract taxes and implement social development programs

Also worth noting is the fact that the importance of formal education corresponds to an organically bound capitalist society, a mechanically bound pre-capitalist or less capitalist society neither attaches the same status nor the same utility or payback to a formal education, which in their case would not reduce inequality, so once again there is this "elite" bias in the index. And, as we know labor force participation is also a function of the mode of production.

The U.N as the political wing of the global capitalist world system is expected to facilitate reproduction of that system and so it does with its "data" (knowledge production) as cultural legitimation, and through legalizing (through legislation, read resolutions, or silence) aggression by the major powers against weaker ones as in the case of the Iraq and Libya wars and its total helplessness to counter Israeli occupation of Palestine. In order to maintain legitimacy however it cannot ignore or bulldoze dissent and just as is the case with intra-country capitalist methodology, it institutionalizes opposition and does it in a fashion where the grievance is highlighted but the solutions are driven in benign directions. Such is their case behind their own recent critique of the GDI and GEM indices.

These critiques had been widely known through academic papers and through the work of several scholars for several years now, so finally they acknowledge the "elite bias" in their previous "data" that had become authoritative around the globe as the end word on gender inequality. But how did they address those grievances as fact is the main point, they did that by just putting a new name to the very same indicators (minus income) and now once again the developed countries are shown in a better light even though their oppression of women, especially violence against women is much greater as measured through the UN's own "rape statistics."

The way/method to remove the "elite bias" from the gender measure, which is more a measure of capitalization would be to weight the scores by degree of capitalization, in effect controlling for "capitalism." This can be done empirically quite easily by constructing an index of capitalism with well known indicators and then adjusting the scores based upon approximation to perfect capitalism, i.e. a score of 1. So supposing we were to take the percent of labor force working in the primary sector (agriculture) as a proxy of degree of non-capitalism using the mean of the capitalist countries that have under 10% across the board almost working in this sector, and adjust the agricultural country scores to reflect this baseline, i.e. reducing their inequality scores to "control for capitalism", many of the so called developing countries would show much lower gender inequality compared to the high income countries.

What the UN measure does is that it gives the advantage of what economists refer to as "economies of scale" to the high income countries, where indicators of "bigger" capitalism show up as lesser gender inequality because of the larger scale of capitalism within these countries. The UN socially constructs BS and then because

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