About the gender indicators

We provide gender related indicators for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and subnational regions within these countries.

The indicators in this database are:

Age difference between partners is calculated as the age of the man minus the age of the women.

Matrilocal households are households where the couple lives with the parents of the wife. Patrilocal households are households where the couple lives with the parents of the husband.

The patrilocality index is the log of the percentage of patrilocal households divided by the percentage of the matrilocal households in the area.

Construction of indicators

The indicators in this database are created by aggregation from household surveys, i.e. taking the average of the values of a characteristic of individuals or households in an area.

The sub-national areas that are used for aggregation are based on the geographic information that is present in the survey datasets. The available regional coding is often, but not always, based on official administrative subdivisions used in the countries.

In cases where regional subdivisions have changed over time, the subdivisions used in earlier and/or later surveys are adjusted to keep comparability.

For relatively small datasets a reduction in regions may be done to increase the number of cases on the basis of which aggregation takes place.

For some countries for which regional divisions differ too much between years to make data comparable, different divisions are used for different years.

Data sources

We combine survey data for over 500 recent (1990+) household surveys and other sources for 130+ developing countries and almost 1,500 subnational regions from the following sources:

More information

Detailed information on the construction of indicators through aggregation can be found in:

• Smits, J. (2016), GDL Area Database: Sub-national development indicators for research and policy-making. GDL Working paper 16-101.