Relationship Between Democracy and Gender Inequality : A Cross Country Analysis

This work attempts to explore the relationship between Gender Inequality Index (GII) and World Democracy Index (WDI) in the context of 152 countries through descriptive and econometric analysis of the GII and WDI for the year 2019. To adequately address the issues, we extended our analysis to different income groups as Low-income economies (26 countries), lower middle-income economies (35 countries), upper middle-income economies (46 countries), and high-income economies (46 countries). In general, we found a highly statistically significant negative correlation between Gender Inequality Index and World Democracy Index. If countries can move to a more democratic situation, they will be able to witness improvement in its gender equality. But, individually, in the case of low income, lower middle income, and upper middle-income economies the result is not that statistically significant and produces some mixed results. For example, we found a positive correlation between GII and WDI in upper middle-income economies. In these income groups, this literature requires further investigation to bring out the reasoning’s. In case of high-income economies, the result is consistent with the overall result. At the early stage, we didn't find any relationship between the variables in an economy. However, it is likely that over the development process there will be an intrinsic relationship between the variables which is consistent with another finding of our literature