How to Study Gender Equality Policy Cross-Nationally? Aggregate or Disaggregate Gender Equality Policy Indices?

Abstract

This paper discusses the approaches to study gender equality policies and presents a scheme of best ways to study gender equality policies. Looking to the literature, there are three main approaches to study gender equality policies. First of all, there are studies which focus on one, two or small numbers of issues of gender equality policies such as abortion policies, domestic violence policies or day care policies and examine the country dynamics either in single case studies or large and small-N comparative studies. Secondly, sectoral approach to study gender equality assumes that gender equality policy is a separate sector of government policies which includes various subsectors such as representation policies or reproduction policies. Lastly, international organizations such as the United Nations applied aggregation strategy by combining different indicators of gender equality policies into an index. These kinds of indexes are widely used by scholars with the aim of comparing countries’ responsiveness to gender equality. This study questions strengths and weaknesses of each approach and proposes a scheme to determine the best use for each approach. In doing that this paper also presents new and original scales to study different dimensions of gender equality and includes an empirical analysis of gender equality policy indicators for 84 countries’ responsiveness to gender equality.