Explaining the Role of the Gender Gap in Having Opportunities and Its Effects on the Poverty Gap

One of the most important goals of the third millennium is to promote gender equality. This means that women should have equal opportunities to develop their talents. But the statistical evidence clearly shows continuous significant differences at the level of education, health and, most importantly, income between developing and developing countries. Economists have proposed different theories and models to explain the reasons for the gap between developing and developed countries. These theories attribute the gaps to institutional factors such as education and health. Therefore, given that gender poverty is inherent, understanding the corresponding interactions is essential to designing and implementing policies that help reduce the gender gap and free women from poverty. New institutionalists believe that an institutional change affect their choices and, consequently, the economic performance of the society in the long run by changing the motivational structure of individuals. Among various institutional factors, democracy along with factors such as physical capital and human capital seem to play prominent roles in the process of development and poverty reduction of countries. Explaining the concept of democracy, Jeremy Bentham states that each member of the society should be considered as one person. In fact, the basic premise of democracy is the participation of citizens in decision-making and the equality of all the members of the society, far from gender gaps. Accordingly, it seems that the democratic or authoritarian nature of the ruling structure can be a significant factor in determining the status of development and poverty. Many political scolars have tried to prove the hypothesis that development increases the demand for maximizing political rights. Indeed, the traditional argument that development paves the way for democracy was first put forward by Seymour Martin Lip set et al (1959) and then by Rueschmeyer et al. (1992), Daya Mond (1992), Lip set et al. (1993). According to this argument, high welfare promotes democratic institutions and moderates social contradictions by creating a broad middle class and eliminating social gaps. According to this view, the realization of democracy is related to the level of economic development, and a country is likely to achieve democracy when it has undergone stages of economic development or its citizens have received a certain level of education. It is also claimed that the factors that contributed to the rise of democratic regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, most of which were authoritarian, were the high levels of economic recovery that led to the expansion of literacy, education, and urbanization to the middle class. It strengthened pro-democracy values ​​and behaviors. Democracy is based on the luxury of goods and can only be used after the difficult task of development has been completed. In the opposite view that democracy is the agent of development, a group of thinkers such as Amartya Sen emphasize that freedom and democracy are parts of development. It has been  also pointed out that sustainable economic growth occurs only in democracies,  and that democracy is a factor in the elimination of gender gaps and the better functioning of the economy. In the present study, a comparative analysis is performed of poverty reduction through education, income and health gap indicators with an emphasis on democracy. It is done by examining the two perspectives raised during the period 20-20-2004 and using the panel soft transfer threshold (PSTR) approach. The questions to answer are ‘Can differences between men and women in terms of wages, education, and life expectancy considering the system of democracy and autocracy in countries with a very high human development index have an impact on poverty reduction?’ and ‘In which category of countries is this effect greater?’ According to the obtained results, the variables of educational gap, income and health have positive relationships with the poverty gap index in both groups of the studied countries. The coefficients of variables in countries with very high human development index are close to zero. According to the ranking of this group of countries in terms of human development, the values of these coefficients are justified. Also, the coefficients of variables of the type of government system in both groups of countries have no effect on the difference between the study groups. The main factor in reducing poverty is reaching the desired level of development, which means rejecting the view that democracy is the factor of development. In addition to the fact that the traditional structure in developing societies can always create many obstacles such as traditionalism, conservatism and self-righteousness, in the path of political development, the accelerated movement of modernization has also created gaps in the society such as generation gap and identity crisis. Therefore, in general, the main factor in reducing the poverty gap in a country is the improvement of economic and development indicators, including gender, education, income and health gaps; once the gap indicators are improved, democracy will follow.