Gender equality and wellbeing amongst older people: a global age watch comparison Dr Rachel Bennett, University of Gloucestershire, UK (rbennett3@glos.ac.uk) Professor Asghar Zaidi, University of Southampton, UK (asghar.zaidi@soton.ac.uk) Abstract Drawing on the framework developed for the Global AgeWatch Index, this paper presents a gender disaggregated global analysis of the basic educational attainment of older people and the links between older people’s educational attainment, gender equality in older people’s educational attainment, and healthy life expectancy at age 60. Early findings show significant variation within geographic regions in the educational attainment of the current cohort of older men and women. Educational attainment is correlated with healthy life expectancy at age 60 for both genders and for women this persists after controlling for wealth (measured as GNI per capita PPP$). Further, for both men and women, healthy life expectancy at age 60 is correlated with the level of equality in educational attainment after controlling for wealth. The findings highlight the need for early life course interventions in improving the gender equality with respect to access to lifelong education. The Sustainable Development Goals as well as the International Conference on Population and Development Beyond 2014 Review present unparalleled opportunities to shape development agendas and prioritise the wellbeing of people of all ages and both genders. The emerging ageing and development discourse must place gender firmly on the agenda in order to fulfil global commitments to ‘leave no one behind’ and ‘reach the furthest behind first’ . This paper will contribute to the evidence base supporting these international mandates. Keywords: Gender, Gender equality, Later life, Education and health.
Introduction The experience of ageing varies dramatically between men and women, as documented by a wealth of research on ageing and gender, predominately from the perspective of high income countries. Cumulative gendered disadvantages in terms of socio-economic position, access to resources and roles and relationships through the life course have been shown to manifest in poorer outcomes for women in later life (Pratt, 1997, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2009; Zaidi, Gasior, & Zólyomi, 2013). However, Knodel and Ofstedal (2003) amongst others have highlighted that a blanket assumption of a female disadvantage at older ages may be detrimental to supporting older people most in need and advocate the value of contextualised understandings of the role of gender in the ageing experience. Indeed, we are only starting to understand gendered experiences of ageing in low and middle income countries (Bennett and Zaidi 2016). Drawing on the framework developed for the Global AgeWatch Index, the first analytical framework to use quantitative data to present a multidimensional measure of the wellbeing of older people globally (Zaidi, 2013), this paper presents a gender disaggregated global analysis of the basic educational attainment of older people and the links between older people’s ed ucational attainment, gender equality in older people’s educational attainment, and healthy life expectancy at age 60. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda go far further than their predecessors in tackling gender inequality and championing the position of older people. In particular, the commitment to disaggregating indicators by relevant characteristics in the monitoring of the SDGs will not only make it possible to highlight the position of older people relative to other adults, but also to monitor the inequalities within the group of older people. Yet, in the short term, it remains the case that age and gender disaggregated comparable data is scarce, curtailing our understanding of the experiences of older men and women globally. We focus exclusively on educational attainment, one of several wellbeing indicators in the Global AgeWatch Index, exactly because there is global country- level data on this indicator disaggregated by both age and gender. Further, education is an important measure of older people’s coping capacity and enables individuals to accrue advantage across their life course. It also serves as a crucial proxy of people’s capability (Sen 1960). Education can bring improved livelihood opportunities, social, psychological and interpersonal benefits and improved health knowledge, literacy and behaviours (Ross and Wu, 1995, Clouston et al., 2017). The relationship between educational attainment and health have largely been explored by age and gender separately and at a micro level. This study attempts to look at both the country and the global level – how does gender relate to the education-health relationship specifically amongst older people across world regions? The findings of the paper relate to two strong pledges made in the 2030 Agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals: ‘leave no one behind’ and ‘reaching the furthest behind first’.
Data & methods The paper draws on country level data on educational attainment amongst individuals aged 60 years and older, healthy life expectancy at age 60 years and GNI per capita (PPP$) . Educational attainment is a binary variable for measured in terms of having secondary or higher education. Healthy life expectancy at 60 is the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health after their 60 th birthday assuming age specific death rates remain constant. Each of these indicators are freely available by age and gender. Educational data is sourced from Barro-Lee (2010), and healthy life expectancy at 60 data is sourced from the Institute of Health Metrics (2015). The macro level data on GNI per capita come from the World Bank (2017). The analytic sample included 135 countries with complete data across the variables described above. Countries with missing data across the health and gender equality measures were disproportionally low-income countries, reflecting a broader challenge of data availability for ageing research globally, and particularly in developing countries. However, in total approximately three quarters of United Nations member States are represented in the analysis, thus it covers a large majority of countries. A measure of gender equality in older people’s educational attainment in each country was derived by dividing the geometric mean of older men and women’s educational attainment by the arithmetic mean and transforming the result to a scale between 0 and 1, where scores closer to 0 are indicative of lower levels of gender equality in older people’s educati onal attainment and scores closer to 1 are indicative of higher levels of gender equality in older people’s educational attainment . This follows the methodology used to create the indicators in the UN’s Gender Equality Index (UNDP, 2014). A simple scatter plot was used to assess the level of educational attainment of older men and women and the crude difference between educational attainment of older men and women, coded by geographic region. Rankings by the measure of gender equality in older people’s ed ucational attainment were presented on a map to illustrate geographic patterning. Subsequently, the association between gender specific educational attainment and healthy life expectancy at age 60 was assessed using a bivariate Pearson’s correlation coeffi cient. A correlation coefficient close to -1 is indicative of a strong negative correlation whilst a correlation coefficient close to 1 is indicative of a strong positive correlation. Pearson’s correlation was used rather than a non -parametric alternative because the assumption of linearity was met. Further, the assumption of normality is not relevant for this analysis because significance tests are not used as it is not sample data. In the second stage, partial correlation was used to assess the correlation between educational attainment and healthy life expectancy at age 60 controlling for the effect of GNI per capita. The correlation analysis was repeated
for exploring the association between the measure of gender education equality HLE60 of men and women respectively. Results Gender inequality in education Figure 1: Scatter plot of male vs female educational attainment amongst older adults by geographic region 100 Male educational attainment (% of males of with at least 80 60 40 secondary level education) 20 0 0 20 40 60 80 100 Female educational attainment (% of females of with at least secondary level Carribean & Latin America Central Asia & Eastern Europe education) Africa Asia excluding Central Asia North America and Oceania Europe excluding Eastern Europe (Produced in STATA version 16) Figure 1 shows the educational attainment of older men against the educational attainment of older women, colour coded by geographic region. The solid line highlights the points where there would gender equality in educational attainment. As might be expected, in the majority of countries the educational attainment of older men outweighs the educational attainment of older women (points above the line). Educational attainment is particularly low in Africa and the female disadvantage is very acute for most countries in this region. Educational attainment is comparatively higher in Asia,
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