On Thursday, Oct. 13 we held this virtual event to announce the results of our 2022 Inclusiveness Index and provide a demonstration of our new interactive data table. The event included the Inclusiveness Index's three leads, Elsadig Elsheikh, Samir Gambhir, and Stephen Menendian, who present the findings of the latest study, assessed the US and global trends they've observed since first introducing the index in 2016, and spent 20 minutes responding to audience questions. The event was moderated by Emnet Almedom.
Transcript
Emnet Almedom:
Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to the live broadcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us. This is the launch of our 2022 Inclusiveness Index, a project of the Othering & Belonging Institute that's now in its seventh year. My name is Emnet Almedom. I'm an Analyst here at OBI. I'll be serving as your moderator for the next hour. I'm really happy to invite you to this event and invite the project's three leads onto the screen to join me in a little bit. They've been leading this project since it's inception in 2016. Elsadig Elsheikh, Samir Gambhir, and Stephen Menendian.
Stephen is our Assistant Director and Director of Research. Samir is the Director of our Equity Metrics Program. Hi, guys. Elsadig heads our Global Justice Program. In just a bit, this crew will give us an overview of the project. They'll be sharing our latest findings, which could be in your inbox right now, and will show us a cool interactive feature on the website to easily sort and navigate both this year's and past year's results over time. Towards the end of today's livestream, we'll be having a time for a bit of Q&A and back and forth. So please, as thoughts come to you while we're talking, feel free to drop questions into the chat box. Our moderator will bring that to us towards the end of the event.
We also encourage you to go ahead and visit the project page to check it out for yourselves. Our chat moderator should be dropping a link to that in the chat box shortly. Thank you, again. Welcome from all over. Thanks for being here, everyone. I will start with the most basic kind of introductory question. What exactly is an Inclusiveness Index?
Stephen Menendian:
Thank you, Emnet, and everyone who is joining us to share the release of our seventh annual index. The Inclusiveness Index is a really unique instrument and tool, and we hope a useful and revealing one. It is a holistic diagnostic instrument that looks at group-based marginality and inclusion across multiple dimensions of difference. Instead of just having an instrument that looks at say, racial inequality or gender inequality or disability inequality, it looks at all of those things and more. It takes account of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, ability, and religion. And it does so in multiple ways.
It looks at incarceration. It looks at political representation. It looks at inequality. It's really a remarkable and truly unique instrument and I think it's hard for people to grapple with that because it's so holistic in its approach. But it's more than just holistic. It also measures in ranks, countries, nation states, and US States, to see how they rank, where they rank, and how they've changed over time. Because we've been doing this for seven years, we're able to actually see trends and changes in a really powerful way that I'm excited to demonstrate. But let me invite my colleagues in to help answer the question first.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you. Yes. Any additions?
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Hi, everybody. Thank you, Emnet. Hi, Samir and Stephen. I think one thing I will add to what Stephen is saying, that we intentionally moved away or neglect to account for the wealth of a nation when we try to measure inclusivity. Because for us, it was very important, that is to look at policy and laws that are farther ahead the issues of inclusion, and just how to see that without considering the GDP for a country. I think that's one very unique element of our index.
If you look around many indexes, the powerful one of United Nations, one of the trouble you have there, and we try to overcome that trouble, is when you're measuring the GDP and wealth of a nation. Because that could just put an inequitable assessment of a country just because they're wealthy. But rather here in our index, actually rural countries could really have a really high ranking than wealthy or powerfully economic countries in terms of their social policy design and laws.
Samir Gambhir:
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. I just want to add a little bit to what Stephen and Elsadig said. We all have multiple identities and then we assign a single identity to an individual or to a group. It can lead to othering. What inclusivity or Inclusiveness Index does, it actually respects and values those multiple identities and related differences. It actually ensures that the historically and currently marginalized communities are valued and they are brought into the society.
And ensuring that the fundamental needs and rights of these marginalized groups are actually met, and the needs respect to the dominant groups are met and respected. I think our Inclusiveness Index does that. And as Elsadig and Stephen mentioned, that we are trying to track the level of inclusiveness within the US States and the nation states in the global context.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you all. I'm really appreciating this point of the multiplicity of identity and thinking about the breadth of identities in this index, and moving beyond just state level, nation state level success. That takes us to our next question to again, think about how these data points express lived experiences for people in terms of marginality and inclusion. What does this index reflect in terms of real stories, real cases that might come to your mind as you have gone through this process over the years?
Stephen Menendian:
Well, this tool is, we hope, more than just a measuring stick, but also an advocacy tool. So that if you're living in one of these states that maybe is performing poorly or in the middle of the pack, you can use our instrument to see why. To see, okay, we're doing really well on gender and we're doing decently on race, but we're doing really poorly on disability. That's where we need to concentrate our efforts. Our hope is that this tool can reveal that and then become an instrument for pushing for change.
Emnet Almedom:
Definitely. Thank you for bringing in the advocacy angle into this. Any additions in terms of that impact in real terms for people, in terms of marginality and inclusion? Thanks you all for setting that general overview and giving us a sense of what this tool is. But I think since it is an interactive tool, let's go ahead and check it out. I think Stephen, you'll be able to do a screen share and be able to present this year's findings and let us check it out together.
Stephen Menendian:
Okay. Let's see if this works. Let me know if you all can see this.
Emnet Almedom:
Looking good. Let us know in the chat if you're following along.
Stephen Menendian:
This really is a remarkable interactive tool we don't think gets enough attention. And hopefully, this demonstration will show you just how remarkable and useful it is. This, when you go to our page and you click index results, this is what you'll see. You'll see this index results. There'll be a paragraph on how to basically use it, an overview the project, and then the table. The table is organized. You can go to the global table or the US and you can also select the year. Let's start off by looking at the United States.
The United States is ranked, if you scroll all the way down, it's ranked. It's 72nd in our 2022 index. You can see here that the United States is ranked on each of the domains. It tells you the specific ranking of the United States, which is not very good on each of these categories. You can see for example, that on race and gender, the United States is actually 123rd and 128th. Not good. And then you can see the overall score, but here's where the magic happens.
When you click the United States, you'll see an overall dashboard of the country. It has the inclusiveness level, which is medium, and a five-category gradient, the population, and then it has all of the indicators that go into the United States. But before I show you the indicators, let me show you the index trend page and then we'll go back to the indicators. What you can see here is the changes in the US ranking over time since 2016, since we launched this index. The United States, when we launched this index, was ranked 23rd, and then it fell in 2017 to 69th. And then it rose in 2018 to 59th, and then back to 68th. And then in 2020 to 65th, and then in 2022 to 72nd. Sorry, in 2021, where it's been stuck in the middle of the pack.
But it's more than just the index. You can also see all of the sub domains. The United States, when it started out, was pretty in the middle of the pack, pretty in the median, moderate on gender, and has since fallen off. Where the United States has really performed poorly is on the general population score, which we can talk about later what goes into that. It actually does pretty well on disability relative to other countries, and is in the top 20 pretty consistently on sexual orientation and LBGTQ inclusion, which doesn't really speak great for the world, but it's decent in that.
And then what you can do is you can go to the indicators. The United States, one of the best, one of the worst indicators rather, and what really drags down the United States is incarceration and you'll see that across the board. Incarceration right in the United States. This is the world average and you can see where the US is, where this is really bad. These needles that you see, these pins on each of the indicators is the world average, and the United States is either above or below the average. Sometimes being above the average is a good thing, like a political representation, but often it is a bad thing, like it is for incarceration.
I'm going to show you also incarceration here. The United States has one of the largest incarcerations in the world. What this shows is we incarcerate 629 people out of every 100,000 in our population, which is very, very, very bad. This is really useful. Also in refugees, we're not really great. Refugees scale is here. We're below the world average in terms of admitting refugees and refugee resettlement. This is not true when we started the index. The United States was actually above the world average, and you can go and see that change over time.
This is one of the remarkable things that you can do. For every country, you can see what goes into it. And you could also re-rank any of these. Let's say you're really interested in race and you just want to see race rankings. You can click race here and re-rank the whole index. You can see all of the countries that are ranked first on race. There's a tie for race, up to I think about ... Yeah. There we go, up to about 36th. And then you can see how things rank. You can rerun the index for whatever you're interested in, and you can also reverse rank it so you can see the lowest ranked first. And then of course, you can do the exact same thing for the US.
I'll show you one US State that has ... Actually, we'll wait to show this, but this is just to give you a flavor of how interactive and amazing this tool can be for really giving you detailed data and helping you see how states and countries perform. I'll stop there.
Emnet Almedom:
Definitely. Thank you, Stephen. It's cool to see the comparative power of the tool and how easy it is to always have that reference to a world or state average at the same time. Would anyone want to add to that? Anything in looking at this maybe for the 100th time that you might want to add, that you're noticing from the display?
Samir Gambhir:
Sure, I'll add a few comments. One is that you see the different indicators that Steven was showing, and also different human dimensions that we have captured; race, ethnicity, gender. What we did to actually come to this level of visualization is that we created a data matrix of all the human dimensions and the domains against which we are trying to capture all the indicators. Within this data matrix, there are potentially 36 indicators.
But what we have now is we've used 17 indicators for the US index and 15 for the global. We have worked with what we have right now. This data matrix is like Mendeleev's Periodic Table. We have all these potential indicators, some are missing. And once we have data on those missing indicators, it'll be a complete index. It'll get added and make this Inclusiveness Index more robust.
Emnet Almedom:
That's amazing to think about that, that long term vision, and to be able to continue expanding the tool. Any additions on this? I know we'll get more time to play around with the tool, but thanks for that demo, Stephen.
We've talked a little bit about this, and Samir, you've touched on this, but I'm curious about maybe how you determine which groups to measure inclusion for and which indicators to use. How did you come to these categories?
Samir Gambhir:
Definitely. As Steven was mentioning at the beginning, and Elsadig as well about the definition of inclusivity, we really wanted to identify the subgroups in the population who are historically or currently marginalized. We identified those groups at the beginning and we said, how do we determine the level of inclusion? What kind of domains do we need to capture? We looked at political representation. We looked at anti-discrimination laws. We looked at group violence, incarceration, immigration, and these different domains. Having identified those, we set forth a set of criteria to determine, how do we select these indicators?
One of the most important thing to consider was that we wanted this to be a multifactor index, and the reason being that multi-indicators actually reflect cumulative advantage or disadvantage. It reflects the society in a much better way than focusing on a single indicator, say poverty or income. We tried to do that and we said, we have to try and get as many indicators as we can within this data matrix. Another criteria was to be able to scale our indicators from the US to the global, so that there's some consistency in what we are measuring for the US and for global.
Also, we wanted to make sure that the data is consistently available for multiple countries or a substantial number of countries and across multiple years. We are in the seventh year and we have tried to do that, keep our data gathering, our data sources consistent throughout these periods. This was really important. The last one was that we wanted to focus primarily on institution policies, laws that reflect inclusivity rather than basing it on the wealth of a nation, and Elsadig alluded to that. Rather than making this into an income-based outcome, you're talking about inclusivity.
Just by that, there's a possibility of a low-income country to be in the top category of inclusiveness. I think this criteria we set forth has actually helped us look at the comparison between countries, comparison between US States, and just trying to look at a country longitudinally or a state longitudinally, or compare countries and states within one year.
Emnet Almedom:
That's really helpful to understand that process and the reliability that you all are seeking over time. We also didn't talk yet about who is at the top this year. Would anyone want to give that grand reveal right now, top state and top country?
Samir Gambhir:
Sure, I can ... Go ahead, Elsadig. It's okay.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Yeah. I think in terms of the US, it was very consistent for the last five years. I think Hawaii has always continued to be number one. But in the global context, New Zealand come on top for this year and push away some other country that used to be. But it's still that high rank, very high. New Zealand on the global, Hawaii in the United States.
Emnet Almedom:
Okay. Yeah. You were alluding to this already, but over the years, the order seems to shift a little bit. But you're saying they more or less remain similar. Can you tell us about any general trends you've observed over the past seven years now of doing this?
Samir Gambhir:
Well, I can go. We know that using our metrics, one cannot follow a simple narrative of difference between global north and global south. Our index, despite some of its shortcoming, is still so robust that there are different countries that get added to the top category of inclusion and in the bottom.
For instance, Nordic countries have stayed on top for consistently over many years, but there've been additions of countries, low-income countries at the top category, and a global north country or countries into the bottom category.
For an example, Bolivia has consistently been on the top category, which is a high inclusive category in all our seven years of calculating our index. On the flip side, Russia and Israel have been at the low or the lowest category consistently in the last seven years.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you for-
Stephen Menendian:
I'll add something to that, Emnet. One thing that's really been disturbing in the seven years in which we have been creating this index is the rise of ethnonationalism, especially across Europe, but across the world. India's ranking in particular has suffered under rising ethnonationalism, Hindu nationalism, religious violence, caste violence. But that's also true in a number of the other countries that we've looked at. Almost by exception, the countries that have escaped this wave of ethnonationalism have gradually risen to the top.
In the top 40, it used to be the case, well, I'll speak for globally, but countries like Uruguay and Paraguay and Ecuador are in the top 40 countries that have resisted a lot of these ethnonationalist tendencies. One of the symptoms of these ethnonationalism is pushing women into traditional gender rules, restricting reproductive rights, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, xenophobia and anti-immigration policies. Those tend to be some of the key hallmarks of this tendency, whether you're talking about Hungary or Poland, and their rankings have suffered as a result.
In the United States, the oscillations have been much different. We've seen, and I'll now use this opportunity to share a US State ranking, but when we started this index, there really wasn't as much of a pronounced regional pattern. You would think that the South, the former Confederate states would be less inclusive. We did see that, but it was pretty much true that there would be within every part of the United States, the Mid-Atlantic, the New England, the Midwest, the Plain States, the Mountain West, et cetera, there would be a state that ranked low and a state that ranked high.
You'd see in the map that we had a gradient, where you'd see there would be at least one Southern state that did really well, or one Mid-Midwestern state that did really well, and one that did poorly. We're seeing a lot more, I think, regionalization now, where there's more of a convergence across regions than existed in 2016. Let me show you some oscillations by looking at Hawaii as an example. Give me a second. Sorry, Ohio as an example. Let me pull that up. Let me screen share. Let me know if you can see this.
Emnet Almedom:
No, just ... Oh, there we go. Yeah.
Stephen Menendian:
Here's Ohio. Ohio is ranked 36th in our index. And again, you can just click the state and you can get all the basic demographic facts. You can see the percentage of people of color, gender, where it's ranking, population, et cetera. And then of course, you have all the indicators and you can see of where Ohio is relative to the national average. But what I wanted to show you here is again, the index trend, so you click index trend.
When we started the index, Ohio was actually ranked 11th in 2016. There was a pretty steep drop off from 2016 to 2017, and that drop off continued over the ensuing years. I'm not going to say it, but you can go and look and see what happened to the politics of Ohio in that period and how they changed from this. Again, there's a data lag, if you didn't know that. When we report the 2016 index, we're really reporting data that were collected in the preceding years.
Ohio continued to fall off and has improved somewhat, but you can see why if you look at some of these sub indicators. Where Ohio has really fallen off is inclusion for LGBTQ people. When we launched, it was ranked 13th, and in 2020 was dead last. It's rebounded somewhat. It's now in the middle of the back, but that helps explain this downward trend. You can look at some of the specific data points here, but this is an oscillation and we see with a number of states, some of these oscillations.
It's hard to explain exactly why, but you can get into the data and hopefully use this data by looking at the indicators to help make sense of this. I'll stop there.
Emnet Almedom:
Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think now we've gotten a chance to look at a couple specific examples. We were talking about the top states from a moment ago, so I'll turn back to that. Hawaii is the number one most inclusive state each year. Can we speak a little bit about why that is, do something similar like the deep dive we just did on Ohio?
Stephen Menendian:
Sure. Rather than show the data, I'll just mention a couple things about Ohio first. I mean, Hawaii.
Emnet Almedom:
Hawaii.
Stephen Menendian:
Hawaii is unique in a number of respects. It actually is the state in the country that has the largest multiracial population. In the 2020 Census, the fastest growing racial group, if you will, is actually those who identify as multiracial. The United States has a number of states like California and Texas that were so-called majority minority in the late '90s or early aughts, meaning that people of color or nonwhite people became a majority of the state population. This first happened among 18 and under, and then young adults, and now is true for the general population.
But the number of people who identify as multiracial between 2010 and 2020 has just exploded in the country. It's several 100% increase. It's a very large increase. We're becoming a much more multiracial society, but Hawaii is where this is occurring first and foremost, and most visibly. What that means is that, and social psychologists and psychologists have been studying this, when people, especially children live and play in Hawaii, they're navigating a much more complicated terrain, racial terrain, where some of the stereotypes and simplistic characteristics that are ascribed to race can't really hold because people are both racially ambiguous and multiracial. And so it's just complicated. Hawaii does really well, I think, on all of the indicators. If you just click Hawaii, you can see it's at the top in almost everything.
But I think it's partly the distance, the non-proximity to some of the cultural tropes and stereotypes that hold and fix in the mainland are disrupted in Hawaii. There's of course, the whole colonial history of Hawaii, which we don't have time to get into, but it really is its diversity and multiculturalism and multiracial landscape that plays a large role in that, beyond just the data. Invite others to answer that question as well.
Emnet Almedom:
Yeah. It's interesting to think about that mix of culture and structure in that case. Yeah. Any additions in the case of Hawaii? Maybe let's turn globally. Elsadig, I'll give this one to you. But what about some of the global trends? Why do Nordic countries, and you mentioned New Zealand came up on top for the first time this year, why are they always scoring so well? What stands out?
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Well, a very similar trend to the US. I want to draw attention to the audience that oftentimes, the design flaws and public policy, what it drives, either a phenomena of inclusion or marginality, is very consistent in the history of the Nordic countries. That's at least for the last 100 years. There's been a consistent attempt to develop very strong social welfare state. And also extreme sensitive gender policy in the positive terms. What that does, because you don't have to do everything good in all the domains or indicator, but if you're doing substantial ones, you could actually see how it can be positive in other areas. I will stick with the issues of closing the gender gap, for example.
The more you do that in any given society, the most likely you further something else in that society. For example, labor force, political representations. Over time, we've been seeing through studies that women, for example, have more sensitive positive position toward accepting refugees or resettlements, for example. By doing one thing, a country designs social policies and laws. It does something in one domain and it has a reverberation in other domains. But we cannot just say this is accidental. Because I think by design of the leader of those countries, they did something very substantial.
New Zealand, for example, escaped the way in which that vilify a newcomer being hospitable, being a more tolerant country in terms of religion's difference. But that's also, I want to just caution us. That doesn't mean all this country are really perfect. They have also suffer from own social ills. But when you compare them with other countries, you find them really stand out. And this is what the power of the Inclusiveness Index. It's to show that beyond economic and GDP, the power of inclusion, to move the needle of inclusion is reside within the design of laws and public policy that gives toward holistically to the whole society, and to uplift the most vulnerable in our society.
When you do that, whether you are a state or you are a country, you will see the result immediately. And I will close with this. Sometimes it just takes years to see the positive in the countries that we're seeing. For example, if we see a phenomena right now, it might not be captured by our index because we have to look back in the data, either last year or up to five years and above.
Samir Gambhir:
I just want to add one more thing to what Elsadig said, with an example. Norway for instance, has consistently ranked higher, I think in the top three rankings. But if you look at the trends, you'll see that it has ranked high in most of these categories except the religion dimension. What Elsadig said, that all the countries which are ranked as highly inclusive have their own set of problems. It's not that they're perfect.
We need to look at this index with a grain of salt and understand that we are not trying to get a perfect index. We are trying to get to something that is easily digestible, it's valuable, and set out those criteria that I talked about at the beginning of the session.
Emnet Almedom:
Right. Yeah. That's a helpful caveat, Samir. Not to think of it as totally comprehensive, but as a space to start and advance conversations. Yeah. It's interesting this theme of the staying power of culture and past policy, and also the disruptive nature of new political winds. We were talking about ethnonationalism being one that's starting to show up in the data. We'll move into some of our last couple of prepared questions and then I know folks in the chat have had a lot of questions, which is great. Please keep them coming.
How can a state or country improve its ranking? I know we've talked a little bit about some of the standout metrics for certain states, but are there any that you want to maybe point us out to that are more trends across the board of how a state or country might improve its ranking?
Elsadig Elsheikh:
I think in the general terms, like I stated earlier, is the design of those type of laws on social policy. And we see with or without any exceptions, when a country does that, it definitely moves ahead or stay in top ranking. When countries remain locked down in the bottom of the index, we see the same trend. There is no way for a country to move in our index any further unless they make an improvement in their laws and social policies that kept the marginalized people at the lower place or out of site.
You can take any examples, but again, I just want to say one thing, that we work with data collected by others and by ourselves. What I'm trying to say, the index is not perfect for that reason; for imperfection of data collections. What type of biases existed in data outside of our control? I'll give you an example of a country that is doing so well, but unfortunately lockdown. Maybe two countries.
One of them is Rwanda, and the second is Costa Rica. There is a reason for that. In my personal opinion, that's the way in which people from outside look into the inside and gathering data. In the case of Rwanda, for example, they make a lot of progress in social policies. For example, in gender, they remain one of the top country if you look by subgroups. It is very impressive for a country to come out in the last 25 years out of massive genocide to move ahead in terms of closing the gender gap.
But the way in which we perceive Rwanda from outside maybe lacked Rwanda in terms of data gathering, that Rwanda actually does not recognize tribes and clans, which has caused the genocide. But still, we remain outside. We looked at them as whose people in power are influential that belong to that particular tribe. We designated the connotation to them, the identity issue, and that's what became imperfect in a sense of the case of Rwanda.
Samir Gambhir:
I'll just add to that and answer your question as well, Emnet, that any country or US State can improve its ranking by enacting policies that are inclusive of race, ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ community, and all those dimensions that we mentioned. We've seen that the countries which have actually moved up in the ranking, they can attribute that to the changing political, social, and cultural environment through progressive policies and investing in people.
For example, if the administrative units, whether it's US States or nation states, they actually promote or accept transgender rights. They are actually exemplifying their role in the society, saying that they're equally valued. And that's helping co-create healthy and inclusive communities. It's very important that these policies are very carefully looked at and ensure that all these different communities are equally valued.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you both. I think we're going to turn to questions from our audience because we've had several come our way. Here's one from Mia or Mia. Thank you for being here. Thanks for your question. How can or should one use the accessible and interactive aspects of the Inclusiveness Index as an educational tool? Can this be integrated well into the classroom?
Stephen Menendian:
I definitely think so. One thing you could do is you could structure a classroom discussion or even homework assignments, or even research assignments. You could have students select specific countries or US States and then write a summary of what the Inclusiveness Index says about them, and why states are ranked where they are and how they've changed over time. I think if you have a 30-student classroom, you could have a student pick a state or a nation state and just write a summary on why it's ranked where it is.
And then you could potentially have them do research papers, look into newspaper clippings, look into policy changes that undergird the data. This is a weighted variable index, meaning that we weight variables differently within the index and we've made changes. Most weighted variable indices like this, you improve them, you tweak them over time. But you can download the data on our website. Samir, can you share how people can access that?
Samir Gambhir:
Sure. There's a resource tab on your right side on the website. And under the resource tab, you can see datasets that we have for all the years, starting 2016. Someone can download that data and work with it.
Emnet Almedom:
I believe the link has been in the chat floating around, so make sure to grab that. But yeah, I think that's a great example in connecting it also to news stories and the underlying themes that we've talked about today is how politics obviously impacts all of this. Would be really interesting in a classroom setting.
Stephen Menendian:
Could I add, Emnet? One of the questions that came up I see is, are the indicators weighted equally? No, actually we try and equally weight the domains, not the indicators within them. If one domain has five indicators and another has two, then the domain with five indicators within that domain, each of those indicators has a smaller overall weight on the ultimate index score. Samir, I believe that's correct. Please correct me if that's wrong.
Samir Gambhir:
That's correct.
Emnet Almedom:
Perfect. Yeah. Thanks for answering that.
Stephen Menendian:
Just in terms of data, it's really important to emphasize that we're constrained. We're constrained by the data that exists in the world. We need consistent and reliable data reported for every country in order to get them into the index. And it doesn't really exist, which is why we're very happy that we can get nearly 140 countries into our index. But it's a huge challenge. It's less of a challenge in the United States where data is more consistently reported across the country for each of these domains. Just wanted to mention that as well.
Emnet Almedom:
Yes. Thanks for that. That actually ties to a question that was floating. Oh, here we go. For example, people notice there's a couple of countries that are missing. Cuba is being pointed out here. Why is Cuba not included? There's a reference to a new family code that was passed recently and maybe trying to understand how that, wishing that could be reflected in the index. But yeah, what do you all think about this?
Samir Gambhir:
I think I could field the first question if someone else can field the second one. The data question, as Steven was mentioning, that we are trying to get data from as many sources as possible. Data is sometimes available for all countries, sometimes it's not available. It's available for a select set of countries, but not all, so we have had this challenge ever since. We try and dig into all kinds of data sources available and we reach out to not only the established data sources like World Bank and UN data sources. We also look at advocacy groups, research organizations that are collecting this data.
For example, for the political representation by LGBTQ plus community, there's an advocacy and research website called Queer Politics, and it's run by Professor Andrew Reynolds from Princeton University. We approached him, we said, "You collect such valuable data. Can we have that data?" He was gracious enough to share that. Likewise, we have accessed data from UNHCR. We've access data from many other institutions. For the US, we have accessed data from not just the census, but also from Bureau of Justice Statistics. We have accessed data from Center for American Women and Politics from Rutgers University, and we also tapped into our own data source on anti-Sharia law, something that Elsadig is collecting and working on. We look at all these different datasets and try to comprehensively get everything together.
Now, one country or a set of countries dropping off is because we might be missing data on one or more indicators. Even if there's one indicator missing, we really can't compare that country with other countries or one state with other states, because there's one data missing, a data point missing rather. I think that's one of the reasons why Cuba is not in the index. As you can see, out of these 250 different states and regions, countries and regions, we have indexed on 136 countries. It's huge.
When we started off, we could get data only for 120 countries, but we have constantly been looking out for data and managed to gather data for 136, which is quite a feat. But it's just that there are some countries that we don't have consistent data across, indicators across domains, across years.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you, Samir. Yeah. I think this is hitting a couple of different questions folks have had around data gaps and how that interacts with the index. Here's a question from Angelica. Interested to hear how countries with lower racial diversity, like Sweden, is able to jump to the top. What are the parameters based around racial metrics?
Elsadig Elsheikh:
I will take a stab at that. I think that's one of the things that we mentioned. The more the country is less diverse, most likely will have less racial tension. That doesn't mean the country have good racial policy, in the case of Sweden or others. And that also doesn't mean that there is no group in that particular country racially charge. Or the current trend we see today, how racial tension could be weaponized in political campaigns, especially in the case of Sweden, for example. Maybe we'll see the trend for the next coming years. Unfortunately, that will impact the Swedish society in terms of inclusion and get to other different type of cementing marginality toward other groups.
I think on the one hand, diversity, while it's a positive aspect, it is just generate multiple challenge for policy making and for drafting laws, if it's not carefully thought out. Like Samir saying earlier, that most likely country or a state, country, let's focus on countries, will fall into the trap of marginalized population, whether they intend it or not. OBI, Othering & Belonging Institute, we say that when you target the most vulnerable in your society, most likely will benefit other people in the society as well. We can look at it in the reverse terms. If a country more "racially" is regionalized, but it have a smaller population of diverse group, if we focus on this group, most likely the whole entire society would benefit in terms of inclusion and equity and social progress.
Stephen Menendian:
Emnet, if I could just add, it's not specifically answering the question about Sweden's race ranking, but Sweden has historically done a phenomenal job of admitting and resettling refugees. It's far above the world average in the index if you click. It also has an incredibly low incarceration rate. The world average for incarceration is 170 persons per 100,000, and I mentioned how in the United States it was actually over 700 per 100,000 in the 2000s, in the aughts. Sweden's figure for that is 10, 10 people per 100,000 people. It's not just that Sweden does well along one of these dimensions, it does well along all of these dimensions of inclusion.
It has a low incarceration rate. It admits lots of refugees. It has a low Gini coefficient score. It has strong representation, political representation of LGBTQ people. It has a strong enforcement of gender rights and strong representation of women in elected bodies, which is one of the indicators we look at, and which is one of the indicators that Rwanda does well on. It just does really well across the board.
Emnet Almedom:
Yeah. Thank you for bringing some of the other indicators into play for that answer. Elsadig, your points around the exponential power of structural protections for the most marginalized is interesting to think about in these cases of, I think someone mentioned it as countries or states with more racial homogeneity. I'm just thinking about how that it has these effects and positive impacts for people who might not be in the out group.
We've got a question here from TJ. What examples are there of activists, or can activists use the inclusion index in a particular state, especially when it comes to race and disability factor to address inequities? Thinking about back to that theme of how we want this to be a tool for advocates, for activists. What are some examples? Or it could even be, if we haven't seen it yet, what we would wish to see. Go for it.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
Yeah. I think it's very straightforward, the information that Stephen and Samir shared earlier, that when you go to, especially within United States, if you go to the state and click in the indicator to see the trend of a particular US state let's assume, because we focused earlier in Hawaii for example, what Hawaii does bad, what activist things that should improve to make Hawaii even better. You can see over time with that indicator, when it's falling down, and you compare that what in the ground as an activist or organizer, what was happening at that time? Why does falling?
I'm very sure you'll find a very specific set of policies that implemented and caused this, maybe implemented a year before and caused that dropdown. And that could sound the alarm for activists because that's our goal, to use this as a diagnostic tool to see where we are falling, and we could pick up and push back in terms of public policy and laws to improve the ranking or to improve the situation.
People in that local or in the ground, they actually can use this tool very effectively and even could challenge our team to say, while this ranking is high, we think it's bad in terms of this and that, and to bring it to our attention. And that we ask the audience that we are far from perfect, but the contribution of observation of people on the ground to help us tremendously. But we can just not rely on sentiments of a particular thing. We need also to access data.
An activist organizer could fill that gap, as Samir mentioned earlier. Because it's not just based on a state collection, but it could be developed through an institution like ours to collect certain data in certain specific examples. I hope that answered your question, TJ.
Samir Gambhir:
I just want to add a very small comment, an overarching comment, which is that a conscious effort to reduce othering and promote belonging should be the goal. That is how you can make these societies more inclusive. On another note, Emnet, I think we responded to one question that came up earlier about Cuba's ... There's a policy that was enacted recently, and I would just say that our index, as Steven was mentioning earlier, there's a certain lag in the data. Something that's being enacted now will feature either in the next or the future years. But what we are getting right now is the data from previous years. There's definitely a lag, but I think there's a general trend as to where we are going. If the society is actually improving and enacting policies which are beneficial to these groups, it'll certainly show up as an improvement.
Let me give you another example. For example, India, in the last couple of years, they have removed Article 370, which was criminalizing homosexuality. India has actually improved its ranking in the LGBTQ domain, but overall, we see what's going on. There's deterioration in religious cohesion and there's increased gender-based discrimination and violence. The country ranking reflects what is happening in these different domains. But again, there's lagged data because of which you don't see the policies that are being enacted currently showing up on the index.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you for clarifying that. I think actually it's in concert with another question here from Luna. Quantitative research methods are snapshots in time. Is not the collection of qualitative data as important and provides more comprehensive data? Maybe speak about the relationship between the two.
Stephen Menendian:
Yeah. Let me try and address this question. The original version of the index, the first five years were not a web-based interactive tool. We had a PDF report that was beautifully designed. Our communications team did a phenomenal job. We had a section in it called themes and findings that was explicitly designed to be more qualitative. It was designed to be narrative, qualitative, and complimentary, and make the index more of a mixed methods tool. But the problem is that the qualitative components didn't necessarily sync up with the quantitative components. The team eventually decided that we wanted to make it more interactive and therefore we leaned into the quantitative component and made the index a web-based tool, rather than a report.
But the other piece of it is that, think about how many countries we're including in this index. 136. To really get qualitative data, we would need to run or piggyback on other people running surveys or other qualitative data collection methods for all of those countries, which would entail logistics of designing the survey, implementing the survey, getting representative samples of the survey, translating it into different languages and cultural contexts, which would be enormous amount of work and I just don't think that would be possible for us to do. We are just collecting data that exists and is reported at the global level, either by nation states or the UN, or advocacy organizations and building that into the index. It's just not possible to really create a strong mixed methods quant and qualitative tool in the way that Luna is suggesting.
I think we would all agree, yes, that qualitative data is as important and would contribute to a comprehensive data perspective. But the effort and logistics needed to do that are just way beyond our capacity. It would probably cost tens of millions of dollars to do that for 136 countries.
Elsadig Elsheikh:
I guess if I may, Emnet, add to what Stephen says, that's very true because we tried both. But I think we lean into providing this kind of consortium of data to show something, is to invite a researcher and a scholar, an activist, an organizer actually to take this and to build it into their own context and locale. That's the importance of providing this data, this type of work. Because when the team said seven years, eight years ago, we felt there is a gap in understanding inclusivity and marginality. So how we can aid researchers and even encourage policy makers to do well in certain domain, if they know the complexity and the comprehensive and holistic approach to certain set of policies.
While we agree that we would love to do quantitative, qualitative work, but it's just extremely, extremely ... I'm not saying difficult. It's almost impossible for a small team like ours, and that's the reason why you can only run it by focusing one trend on another. But that doesn't diminish, of course, the quantitative analysis. But we are appealing to the audience here that use this as a part of the pressure to discuss those type of issues on why they see certain trends dragging countries down or moving some states up.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you. Yes, I know folks have been thinking about and asking additional questions around qualitative research, and they've been giving some examples of narrative. I think it's cool to think about how this can be a tool that folks use to do that work independently or in coalition with others.
Well, we're close to closing out here, so keep the questions coming. I think we'll be able to get one or two more. We'll take this one from David next. Are there a few positive and/or more concerning trends or commonalities you're seeing internationally? We touched on a couple of trends, but can we talk about any to wrap us up?
Elsadig Elsheikh:
If Samir or Stephen doesn't want to speak to it, but always we see a positive. But the negative unfortunately is daunting, from restricting people movement, especially refugees or resettlement, and a forcibly displaced person. But we see a very good trend as well and some countries and state try to reform their, for example, policy in relation to gender, but also people's disability. It depends, but the general terms, I think political representation by women and minority group increasing over time.
Not in everywhere, but that's the general positive things we see. The most daunting one is the rise of ethnonationalism and close-off society from different parts of the world. We see it today laid out and unfortunately, maybe tomorrow, too. That could be just a mental and really big hurdle to achieve any progress in terms of inclusion.
Samir Gambhir:
Just to add to that, you're right, Elsadig, we have seen countries and US State values going up and down. It all depends on what's going on in each of these administrative units. It'll be helpful to just look at, are we becoming more inclusive globally? Are we becoming more inclusive in the nation? Those trends will be very helpful.
But because of these changing circumstances, policies that come in or the political change that happens within the country or within the US, that always impacts the overall index. I think going forward, maybe we can look at that. We have actually planned out some offshoot exercises just to look at some trends. But on the onset, it might be hard.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you. Thank you for adding, Samir. I think we are going to wrap up with one last question. We'll get it up on the screen for the data nerds in the audience. Do you examine the statistical variability of your data sources? This audience member, Wesley, is noting that they didn't see any error bars. Do you examine statistical trends and significance particularly over time? I'll pass this one to you, Samir, as you and the Equity Metrics team have probably put plenty of thought into this.
Samir Gambhir:
Sure. Yeah. This is a tough one. As Elsadig, you were mentioning earlier, we rely on data collected by other organizations. We actually depend on the quality of the data, and certainly the quality of the index depends on the input that goes into it. If the data is good, the data is strong, you can expect a better outcome. We have actually employed some statistical methods to get to the index. We have used comparative analysis, trying to see how far each data point is from the mean value.
In technical terms, we've used Z score to try to get to that. But going forward, we will try and do that and try and get deeper into this, and trying to see if there's more statistical evidence. But overall, I think looking at the trends over the past seven years, we know that the data inputs are great and the output actually gives you a trend that is interesting and usable.
Emnet Almedom:
Thank you, Samir.
Stephen Menendian:
Well, just also, this is not a sampling. These are complete. Whatever data source we input is the comprehensive source. We could probably generate some error bars, but it's not a sampling technique that would necessarily come with that kind of information. Samir, did you want to close by acknowledging some of the people who helped contribute?
Samir Gambhir:
Absolutely. I just want to thank my team members, Eve, who's a data scientist with the Equity Metrics team. Shahan Shahid and Marina. Shahan is a current GSR and Marina was an ex GSR. They've helped tremendously and contributed a lot to the development of this index.
Emnet Almedom:
Yes, thanks for that shout out and acknowledging. This is a massive effort. I think people in the audience have been pointing that out as we dive into the work. It's a huge team. Actually, quite a small team for how much work has gone into this, so very impressive. But just, thank you, everyone, for your time, the audience members for being so interactive and great with all your comments.
Even if we didn't get to everything, we hope this is a chance for dialogue with other audience members. I think I've heard a theme from our panelists today that there's a lot, like an invitation to give us feedback to send ideas our way. Please feel free to continue doing that, and thanks for your time. And thanks to our three panelists for sharing about this work. Have a great afternoon, all.
