Indicators of Gender Equality for American States and Regions: An Update

This paper describes the methods and datasources used to update state-level indicatorsof economic, political, and legal genderequality originally developed by Sugarman andStraus (1987). Indicators were combined tocreate an updated version of the GenderEquality Index and relevant subscales. Preliminary evidence of the internalconsistency reliability and construct validityof the updated measure is presented. Acomparison of state rankings for the originaland updated versions of the Gender EqualityIndex reveal that there continue to bestatistically significant differences betweenU.S. states and regions in the degree of genderequality observed but there is evidence of atrend toward greater homogeneity among states. Scores on the overall index have not increasedsubstantially in states identified as having ahigh degree of gender equality previously. Instead, the most dramatic increases areoccurring in states characterized by lowerlevels of gender equality previously. Despiteincreases observed among states, the medianscore of 62 on the Updated Gender EqualityIndex reveals that in the typical Americanstate, women have achieved less than two-thirdsof what is needed to have equality with men.