The Saudi women participation in development index

1 Introduction

Societies are interested in knowing where they are and where they are headed. Information and measurement are essential tools to achieve this purpose. In fact, without them it would be difficult to perform an assessment on how much progress a society has made, or identify which aspects to measure, or how to measure them (Global Gender Gap Report, 2017). Also, it would be difficult to determine how much advancement could be considered real progress. Each society has its own considerations about what the real meaning of development is, how to measure it, and how to interpret any development results. Moreover, local experts can especially provide this understanding and construct a well representative index that measures local priorities and development needs; then international expertise would complement national knowledge where needed. There is a need to develop a more comprehensive view of development and progress in nations; one that considers social, environmental, and economic concerns, and considers the local needs and customs of a specific region.

Recently, constructing composite indicators have led researchers to develop different methods of weighing and aggregating individual indicators into a single index (Ding et al., 2018). Ding et al. (2018) presented a new mechanism to build a composite indicator using ranked weights and Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA-2). (Santeramo, 2015) In another work, Santeramo (2015) computed several composite indices for food security with different methods to impute and homogenize weights, and to aggregate data. (Wineman, 2016) Similarly, Wineman (2016) built a multidimensional index of food security using principal component analysis technique.

In this paper, we construct a compound index that measures Saudi women participation in development in Saudi Arabia. The index is composed of five major pillars that affect women participation in development: education, health, legislative structure, economic opportunities, and social engagement. Each pillar is divided into relevant components that reflect the needs of a changing Saudi economy, but account for necessary local and cultural considerations. All 54 components are weighted and averaged into the final index. This index aims to help decision makers around Saudi Arabia and Saudi citizens to highlight their great achievements in development, as well as find solutions to improve their weaknesses. The index can also be used as a tool by the government and planning commissions to measure women’s progress against national and international commitments to improve the status of women in economic, social and political spheres. During the process of index construction, benchmarking against world indices was conducted, and major world indices were used as references in constructing the index. In fact, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) was the model against which our index was designed in order to achieve a reflection of the GGGI on the 13 districts of Saudi Arabia. During our alignment of index pillars and components with the Saudi Vision 2030 (Full Text of Saudi Arabia's Vision, 2030), we found that it is necessary to add an extra important pillar that was not mentioned in the GGGI, and that is the social dimension. We need our index to be comprehensive and address our specific needs. Thus, in each pillar, local expert opinion was sought to validate the pillar’s components and their relative weights. Moreover, the index construction team had several international experts review the index, who in turn noted that neither the GCC region nor and the MENA region has such a composed index that focuses on women participation in development. This increased the motivation for us to design such an index which could be beneficiary to all in our region.

The paper starts with a background review of relevant world indices and Saudi Arabia’s rank in these indices. The methodology section follows with information on all the local considerations and needs, datasets, and weight determinations. Lastly there is an analysis of the first-round of results for 2018, as well as potential future studies.

2 Insight into some world indices

The Human Development Report was published in 1990, where human development was defined as a process of diversifying people’s choices, improving their capabilities, and providing an enabling environment in which people can live productive lives (UNDP, 2017). The Human Development Index (HDI) is a measure to evaluate and assess the social and economic development levels of countries. The HDI was developed by the United Nations. This index focuses on three areas: population’s health and longevity; knowledge and education; and decent standard of living. The HDI is basically used to rank countries by level of human development. In 1995, the Human Development Report introduced the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and the Gender Development Index (GDI). The Gender Inequalities Index (GII) was developed to resolve the shortcomings of the GEM and GDI. The GII is a measurement of gender disparity. It was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report 20th Anniversary edition by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). This index measures the loss of achievement within a country due to gender inequality (Gopoian and Mccue, 2008; Dollar and Gatti, 1999). It uses three dimensions to measure opportunity cost: labor market participation, reproductive health and empowerment. Another index, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) (Global Gender Gap Report, 2017) published in 2006 by the World Economic Forum, covers 144 economies in terms of measures of gender equality. Countries are ranked according to calculated gender gaps between women and men in four areas: health, education, economy and politics. By closing 84% of their gender gaps, the three highest ranking countries became a role models in providing these resources equitably between women and men. The lowest country closed around 50% only of its gender gap.

Fig. 1 shows Saudi Arabia’s rankings in some of these major world human development indices. In most of these indices the low position that Saudi Arabia scores does not reflect the status of Saudi women in reality. For instance, Saudi Arabia is ranked 138 out of 144 countries in the GGGI and ranked 131 out of 164 countries in the GDI. There are sometimes unknown survey collection methods and in some cases, the neighboring regions’ averaged scores are used to fill in some of the Saudi missing data. Therefore, a local index, measured by local experts from the region is highly needed. The data must be accurate, collected correctly, and provided by authorized national census units to more realistically reflect the Saudi society (Hertog, 2008). Saudi Arabia has now assigned the General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) to be the source of all national data. All data records are collected directly from the sources by GASTAT, either from ministries and authorities or through national surveys. They intend to collaborate with all world indices and make sure the data is collected with high standards and passed on to global indices to reflect more accurately the status of women and development in Saudi Arabia.

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Fig. 1

The rank of Saudi Arabia in some world indices shown in the numerator of the ratios.

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Fig. 2

The Women Participation in Development Index using three methods of weighing.

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3 Methodology for building the index

To construct a suitable index that measures the participation of women in development, the National Observatory for Women (NOW) at King Saud University signed agreements and secured partnerships with different beneficiaries, such as the Family Affairs Council for index construction, the GASTAT for data allocation, Alwaleed Philanthropies for the national survey for the Social Pillar, and local experts in the fields of each pillar for validation of pillar components and assignment of component weights. After thoroughly researching the methodology of existing world indices during benchmarking and determining the best practices in these fields (Nardo et al., 2005), the index was designed to measure all the national development needs using national statistics. Therefore, it is intended to help decision makers to guide the nation towards Vision 2030 and towards the full development of Saudi Arabia in various fields (Full Text of Saudi Arabia's Vision, 2030), aided by greater women empowerment and participation. Moreover, the Women Participation in Development Index variables can measure Saudi Arabia’s scores in the different world indices. Composite indexing involves essential steps: selection; scaling; weighting and aggregation; and validation (Nardo et al., 2002). It is a concurrent effort during which selection can be altered, weights adjusted, and variables rescaled in order to arrive at final index estimates. The index features include being comprehensive, based on specific and measurable outcomes, robust but sensitive to change, relative to stakeholders and mutually exclusive (Saltelli, 2004).

Five meetings with experts in the fields that influence women’s participation in national development were conducted. These meetings were necessary to come up with the five major pillars, and the relative components of each pillar, and the associated weights related to the components in the index. Overall there were 2 workshops, 3 focus groups, 3 electronic surveys, and one major conference (Table 1) (Alharbi, 2018). The conference titled “The Role of Women in Development: Towards a Thriving Economy” was held at King Saud University’s women campus on April 4–5, 2018. It involved contributions from many ministries and top decision makers together with a group of experts in national development areas. The Women Participation in Development Index was launched experimentally during that conference.

Our composite index consists of five pillars: economic, social, legislation, education and health, each of which consists of several variables that measure the state of gender equality in the country and women participation in development. For instance, the economic pillar has 6 variables that reflect closing the gender gap: in government and private sector workers, in monthly wage, in unemployment, in career professionals and technicians and in running of small and medium enterprises (see Tables 2–6 for further details on the pillars and all 54 components). Construction of the index goes through stages, such as data allocation, national surveys, data normalizing and rescaling, weight assignment, focus groups, pilot testing, and finally measurements of the composite index.

3.3

3.3 Calculation of the index

Each variable is calculated across Saudi Arabia and its 13 administrative districts, and then fed into the calculation of the five pillars and the final value of the Women Participation in Development Index. The value of each pillar ranges from 0 to 1, where 1 represents the best level of participation and representation of women in the field of a pillar. On the other hand, the 0 value represents imparity and reflects neither participation nor representation of women in the field of the pillar. The Women Participation in Development Index is then calculated by averaging all the five pillars, as shown in equation (3).

(3)

$${\mathit{Women}ParticipationinDevelopment}_{\mathit{index}}=\frac{{\sum }_{i=1}^5{x}_i}{5}$$ where x_i is the value of the i^th pillar. As an example, the economic pillar is calculated using the SAW method

(4)

$$x_{\mathit{economic}}=\sum _{j=1}^6{y}_j{w}_j$$ where y_j is the value of the component and w_j is the associated weight determined by the SD method or expert opinion, or equal weights (Global Gender Gap Report, 2017).

Comparison among districts in terms of the Women Participation in Development Index as well as in terms of the pillars and their components will help decision makers develop policies that have high impact on women’s participation in development and discover strengths and weaknesses around the different districts (Alharbi, 2019). The Mazziotta-Pareto index (MPI) method proposed in (Mazziotta and Pareto, 2016) is used to rank the 13 districts among the 5 pillars. The MPI method uses a non-linear function that introduces a penalty for variables with unbalanced values. Fig. 3 illustrates the comparison of the 4 different methods to construct the pillars.

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Fig. 3

The ranks of the 13 districts in each pillar using the four methods.

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4 Results

Tables 2–6 show the results of the data that was available in 2018 from GASTAT together with the data source. Values are presented for each variable of the five pillars in Saudi Arabia and the 13 districts. The Women Participation in Development index is calculated using all methods of weighing. Tables 7 illustrates the calculation of the MPI for the economic pillar.

The 2018 value of the Women Participation in Development Index for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, using the SD weighing method, is 0.62, where the largest value of the index is 0.65 at Al Jawf and the smallest value is 0.60 at Najran (the values using the other weighing methods are available in Fig. 2. The economic pillar has a value of 0.42, showing that 42% of the gap between women and men in their participation in economic development is closed. For example, the gender gap in the government sector workers is closed by 24%, which can be interpreted as that for each 100 men there are 24 women working for the government. Moreover, the gender gap in running small and medium size enterprises is closed by 44%. It is important here to highlight the fact that there is no wage gap in the public sector between men and women in Saudi Arabia, and it is one of the countries that supports equal wage for men and women.

The social pillar has the value of 0.65. As the value gets closer to 1 the socio-economic environment is more supportive of women participation in development. 85% of Saudi women have social media affiliation and 97% of Saudi women have support and belong to a social network of support in times of crises. 26.4% of Saudi families are headed by women or partially supported financially by women.

The value of the legislation pillar is 0.13. The legislation pillar revealed a high gender gap where only 14% of the gender gap is closed in senior positions in the government sector, 10% of the gender gap is closed in managerial positions in the private sector, 25% of the gender gap is closed in the Shura council, 1% of the gender gap is closed in each of the municipal council, participation in municipal elections, and the rank of minister, with only 14% of the gender gap in number of promotions closed. It also showed that women felt a sense of job security at the rate of 8.46 out of 10 (where 10 means full sense of security) and employment engagement security at the rate of 8.47 out of 10 (where 10 means full sense of job engagement).

On the other hand, the educational pillar has the high value of 0.92, which implies no gender gap in primary, intermediate, secondary and higher education. However, the gender gap in intermediate diplomas and in technical and vocational training is closed by only 21%. Moreover, the gender gap in students studying abroad is closed by 44% (this value is the same across districts because the data is not classified according to districts).

Moreover, a high value was scored at the health pillar 0.98, which shows that women health aspects are not obstructing them from fully participating in national development. In fact primary health care is provided for free to all residents in Saudi Arabia.

It is important to note that there are low values and sometimes negative correlation between objective weights (statistically driven) and the weights given by the local experts. For example, in the economic pillar, the correlation is −0.83 between GGGI-type (SD) weights and expert weights. Which motivates us to rely on the expert weights in future calculation of the index.

In order to compare the three proposed methods for calculating the value of the pillars and the MPI method, we used the ranks of the 13 districts in Fig. 3. One can note that the ranks obtained by the MPI method and the SD weights method are almost the same, except for some differences in the health pillar, due to small values of standard deviation in some variables (standard deviation of birth rate under the supervision of health workers was 0.007). For instance, the ranks obtained by these two methods in the economic pillar is the same for all districts except Riyadh and Makkah with ranks 9 and 10 using the SD method and ranks 10 and 9 using the MPI method. Only three districts get different ranks when comparing the equal weights method and experts' opinion weights method. On the other hand, seven districts scored different ranks when comparing the equal weights method and the SD method. Generally, the SD method gives lower weights for variables with more variability.

5 Conclusions

In this study, we introduced the Women Participation in Development Index, a diagnostic measurement tool produced by the National Observatory for Women at King Saud University. The index consists of five pillars averaged equally into the main index and 54 components with weights constructed through different methods. The dataset covered all 13 administrative districts of Saudi Arabia. A national survey was conducted in January 2019 to provide some of the missing data, specifically for variables in the social and legislative pillars. The index is important to Saudi development, particularly in highlighting the role of women in development and their contribution in the realization of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. The index and its pillars and components are aligned with SDG goals as well. Women status and participation in development in Saudi Arabia has improved lately due to several royal decrees that help empower women legislatively, economically, and socially.

Future work will require calculating the Women Participation in Development Index yearly using data obtained regularly from GASTAT and providing an update to the weights according to national development needs. Moreover, the general trend of the index could be analyzed after accumulating several consecutive years of measurements to monitor progress towards specific goals, measure change, and find a time series for index values to give a more comprehensive picture of Saudi women contributions in national development. Moreover, the robustness characteristic of the proposed index could be further studied through uncertainty and sensitivity analyses (Saisana et al., 2005).