Interpreting the concept of representational inequality to reckon between-group inequality for different types of data

Inter-group disparity is usually reckoned by using some conventional summary measures, which take into account the distributional characteristics of the underlying cardinally measurable attributes across groups. However, for categorical data these conventional summary measures cannot be applied in a meaningful way to assess between-group inequality. This note reintroduces the concept of ‘representational inequality' (RI) presented by Reddy and Jayadev (2011a and 2011b) and develops some measures of such inequality, which are shown to produce meaningful results if applied to either cardinal or ordinal data. The empirical illustration of the developed measures of between-group inequality based on the concept of RI is then provided using some data set from India.