A Comparative Study of Gender Development Indexes in the Province of Lorestan in 2006

Gender inequality is a part of socio-economic inequality in all societies. Overcoming discrimination is most important in the poverty reduction programmes every societies especialy in developing countries and a useful tools for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals that announced by UNDP. The Gander development index (GDI) is often considered a “gender-sensitive extension of the HDI” (Klasen 245). It addresses gender-gaps in life expectancy, education, and incomes. It uses an “inequality aversion” penalty, which creates a development score penalty for gender gaps in any of the categories of the Human Development Index which include life expectancy, adult literacy, school enrollment, and logarithmic transformations of per-capita income. The GDI cannot be used independently from the Human Development Index (HDI) score and so, it cannot be used on its own as an indicator of gender-gaps. Only the gap between the HDI and the GDI can actually be accurately considered; the GDI on its own is not an independent measure of gender-gaps. In the years since its creation in 1995, much debate has arisen surrounding the reliability, and usefulness of the Gender Development Index (GDI) in making adequate comparisons between different countries and in promoting gender-sensitive development. The GDI is particularly criticized for being often mistakenly interpreted as an independent measure of gender-gaps when it is not, in fact, intended to be interpreted in that way, because it can only be used in combination with the scores from the Human Development Index, but not on its own. Additionally, the data that is needed in order to calculate the GDI is not always readily available in many countries, making the measure very hard to calculate uniformly and internationally (Ibid). So the participation and role of women in various cultural, social, economic and political fields determine levels of development indicators in each country around the world. Existing data’s shows that women's condition in Iran’s during last decades have dual status. In terms of some HDI indicators component such as health and education, women in Iran are in a situation more better than most countries in the region, but their share of participation rate in labor market and income earning is in very low level in compare with other developing countries. In this case Lorestan province is one of the most poor areas. This study’s research method was been second data analysis as a interpretive approach, and critical perspective. While focusing on theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the gender development index be discussed. So this research took about the methods that used here is numerical taxonomy and data matrix - have been used too. Discussion of Results & As mentioned in state of problems, here the finding shows that Lorestan gender development indicators (GDI) are in low level. But inter provinces analysis among town and cities shows many different among districts. For examples in field of cultural- educational indicators, cities of Borujerd and Khorramabad occupied high developed rank, and then Doroud and Poldokhtar rank is relatively developed cities, some other cities such as Koohdasht,and Azna been relatively disadvantaged and finally most poor sections of cities are located in Aligoodarz and Delfan. Base on results and this study finding a longtime development plans is needed to try increase and improve of gender development indicators in all cities with focus on poor areas same Delfan and Alighoodarz.