Gender equality index : a new driver for social change? : online discussion report

In 2013, the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) launched the Gender Equality Index. The need for the Gender Equality Index was initially introduced by the European Commission in the Roadmap for equality between women and men 2006−10. The EIGE was assigned the task of constructing a composite indicator on gender equality that reflects the multi-faceted reality of gender equality, and is specifically tailored towards the policy framework of the European Union (EU) and Member States. The work on the development of the Gender Equality Index for Europe started in 2010 and the results were officially launched at an EU conference in Brussels on 13 June 2013. The Gender Equality Index relies on a trustworthy statistical methodology. In spite of the scarcity of data, stringent criteria are applied to the gender indicators, requiring that variables are available and comparable across all Member States. The computation of the Gender Equality Index avoided subjective decisions in the way a weighting and aggregation method was selected. The process relied on a computation of more than 3 000 alternatives in order to choose the best and most robust index.