Consider the following statements : A. Gender Development Index is a composite index of health, education, empowerment and labour market. B. When the above four factors are considered together, inequality in women and men has adverse impact on Human Development Index.
- (1)Only A is correct
- (2)Only B is correct
- (3)Both A and B are correct
- (4)Both A and B are incorrect
Correct — option (3), both statements A and B are correct, per the key. Statement B is safely correct on its own: gender inequality across the dimensions of health, education, command over economic resources and participation in public and economic life is well established in Human Development Report literature as a drag on a country's overall human development achievement — it is exactly why the UNDP began publishing gender-adjusted measures alongside the plain Human Development Index (HDI) in the first place, so that a country's headline HDI number could not hide large, systematic gaps between how well its women and its men actually live. Statement A needs a caveat that is worth knowing precisely: the UNDP's Gender Development Index (GDI) itself is built from three dimensions, not four — health (measured by female and male life expectancy at birth), education (expected and mean years of schooling, by sex) and command over economic resources (estimated earned income, by sex) — mirroring the three pillars of the plain HDI, computed separately for women and men and then compared as a ratio. 'Empowerment' and 'labour market' are, in UNDP's own framework, the dimensions of a companion measure, the Gender Inequality Index (GII), introduced in 2010, which uses reproductive health, empowerment and labour-market participation instead. GDI and GII are published together in the same gender chapter of the Human Development Report and are frequently taught and summarised together in exam material, which is almost certainly why this question's statement A bundles all four dimensions under the single label 'Gender Development Index' — treating GDI loosely as shorthand for the whole family of UNDP gender measures rather than citing its own three-dimension formula precisely. That imprecision is worth flagging for anyone using this card to build a mental model of GDI specifically, even while the key's answer is followed here.
- (1)Only A is correct — This would require statement B to be false, but B's claim — that gender inequality across health, education, empowerment and labour-market participation adversely affects overall human development — is well supported: it is the entire rationale for the UNDP publishing gender-adjusted development indices in the first place, so that a country's plain HDI score cannot conceal a large internal gap between outcomes for women and men. Nothing in mainstream development literature treats that adverse relationship as false, so an option that discards B while keeping A cannot be right.
- (2)Only B is correct — This would require statement A to be false outright, but the key treats A as correct alongside B. Read charitably, A is not being tested as a precise recitation of GDI's own three-part formula (health, education, income) but as a general description of the family of gender-development measures UNDP publishes — GDI and its companion Gender Inequality Index (GII) together do span health, education, empowerment and labour-market participation. Marking A wholly false ignores that broader, commonly taught framing.
- (4)Both A and B are incorrect — This discards both statements, but B in particular is a well-established point in development economics — that persistent gender inequality across health, education, empowerment and labour-market outcomes drags down a country's realised human development relative to what its raw income and average outcomes would suggest. Marking both statements false leaves nothing standing, which does not match the key's assessment of either statement.
The plain Human Development Index (HDI) averages a country's achievements in health (life expectancy), education (years of schooling) and standard of living (income), but says nothing about how those achievements are distributed between women and men. UNDP addressed that gap with two companion measures, published together since 2010: the Gender Development Index (GDI), which recomputes the HDI separately for women and for men across the same three dimensions — health, education, income — and expresses the result as a female-to-male ratio; and the Gender Inequality Index (GII), a separate composite built from three different dimensions — reproductive health, empowerment (parliamentary seats held by women, secondary-education attainment) and labour-market participation — that measures the human development cost of gender inequality directly, on a 0-to-1 scale where 0 is full equality.
MPSC's economy section tests whether a candidate can tell UNDP's related gender indices apart by their actual component dimensions, rather than treating 'gender' and 'development index' as interchangeable buzzwords. This question also rewards the general point, independent of GDI/GII's exact formulas, that gender inequality in outcomes — not just in raw income — is understood to be a drag on a country's realised human development, which is the policy justification for publishing these indices at all.
- UNDP's Gender Development Index (GDI) is the ratio of the female HDI to the male HDI, each computed from the same three HDI dimensions — health, education and command over economic resources — but split by sex.
- UNDP's Gender Inequality Index (GII), introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report, uses three different dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and labour-market participation.
- GDI and GII are published together in the Human Development Report's gender-development chapter, which is why exam material sometimes describes their combined four-plus dimensions under a single loosely used label.
- Both indices exist because a country's aggregate HDI score can conceal large internal gaps between the human development outcomes of women and men.
Both are real UNDP measures, but the four-factor list in this question blends GDI's and GII's separate formulas.
- Treating 'Gender Development Index' as a catch-all label for every UNDP gender statistic, rather than knowing it specifically means the female-to-male HDI ratio across health, education and income
- Assigning GII's dimensions (empowerment, labour market, reproductive health) to GDI, or vice versa, when a question names one index specifically
- Assuming a composite index with more listed 'factors' is automatically more comprehensive or more correct than one with fewer, rather than checking which dimensions actually belong to which named index
MPSC's economy section frequently pairs two statements about a UNDP or Government of India composite index and asks which is correct, testing precise recall of which dimensions belong to which named index rather than general familiarity with the idea of 'development indices'.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
UNDP's Gender Inequality Index (GII), introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report, is built from which three dimensions ?
- (a)Health, education and income
- (b)Reproductive health, empowerment and labour-market participation
- (c)Life expectancy, literacy and per-capita GDP
- (d)Nutrition, sanitation and housing
Answer(b) Reproductive health, empowerment and labour-market participation — these are GII's three dimensions, distinct from the health-education-income dimensions used by the Gender Development Index (GDI).
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Gender Development Index (GDI) is calculated as ?
- (a)The ratio of a country's female Human Development Index to its male Human Development Index
- (b)The percentage of parliamentary seats held by women
- (c)The female labour-force participation rate divided by the male rate
- (d)A country's maternal mortality ratio adjusted for income
Answer(a) The ratio of a country's female Human Development Index to its male Human Development Index — both computed from the same three HDI dimensions of health, education and income, split by sex.