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, inequ

Question

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.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer

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