The study draws on the BES dataset, the Benessere Equo e Sostenibile framework that the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Istat, has maintained since 2013 as an official dashboard of equitable and sustainable well-being. The framework spans twelve domains, ranging from economic well-being, education and health to environment, innovation, landscape and cultural heritage, politics and institutions, quality of services, security, social relations, subjective well-being, and work and life balance. Because the researchers wanted to compare well-being and gender equality on common ground, they restricted the analysis to the 64 indicators for which gender-disaggregated data are consistently available at the regional level, out of the full set of 85. A robustness check confirmed that this restriction barely matters: indices built from the reduced set correlate almost perfectly with those built from the full set, preserving the main territorial patterns.

The methodological core of the paper is its insistence on keeping two concepts separate that most existing indices quietly blend together. Widely used instruments such as the UNDP’s Gender-related Development Index, the Gender Inequality Index, and the European Institute for Gender Equality’s Gender Equality Index combine information about how well a territory performs overall with information about gaps between women and men. The authors, following earlier critiques by scholars such as Iñaki Permanyer, argue that achievement levels can dominate these supposedly equality-focused scores. To quantify the problem, they replicated the GEI methodology on BES data and decomposed each score into an achievement component and an equality component. The result was striking: in 71 percent of cases the achievement component contributed more than half of the final index value, and on average the equality component accounted for only about 42 percent. That finding sits uneasily with official GEI guidelines, which explicitly recommend that the equality contribution should outweigh the correcting factor for every country and variable.

To build their own gender equality measure, the researchers constructed outcome-based gap indicators, comparing women’s and men’s outcomes directly while disentangling parity from overall achievement. Both composite indices were assembled through a careful pipeline of normalisation, aggregation, and sensitivity testing. For the well-being index, the authors tested sixteen alternative specifications, combining four normalisation methods, including z-scores, min-max rescaling, distance-from-best, and Borda scores, with four aggregation schemes mixing linear additive averages and geometric averages. For the gender equality index, which is bounded between zero and one, four aggregation schemes were tested. Regional hierarchies proved remarkably stable across all specifications, with correlations between baseline and average rankings exceeding an R-squared of 0.99, and trimmed-bounds normalisation designed to guard against outliers changed essentially nothing.

The first headline finding concerns geography. Regional well-being follows the familiar North-South gradient that has defined Italian economic life since unification, with northern regions such as Bolzano, Trento, and Emilia-Romagna at the top and southern regions clustered at the bottom. Gender equality, by contrast, displays a far more fragmented geography, with no comparable clean gradient. This divergence matters because it means policymakers cannot assume that lifting a region’s overall standard of living will automatically close the gaps between women and men, nor that prosperous regions are necessarily the most egalitarian ones.

Principal component analysis sharpened the picture. For well-being, the PCA identified a single broad achievement dimension that dominates regional differences, consistent with the idea that prosperous regions tend to do better across the board. For gender equality, the structure was more multidimensional: a first component captured what the authors interpret as a human development and civic dimension, anchored in social relations, health, education, and politics and institutions, while a second, more cautiously interpreted component reflected quality of life and economic gender equality. A bootstrap stability check based on 2,000 resamples of the 21 regions confirmed that the first component is highly stable and that the second is consistently retained as a separate dimension, though its economic anchor is less certain. Combining the retained components yielded exploratory regional profiles in which high well-being and high gender parity do not necessarily coincide, a result the authors present as descriptive rather than a statistically optimal clustering.

The paper also documents which side of the gender gap is advantaged, and where. Across the overall index, male outcomes were more favourable than female outcomes in 57.9 percent of indicators on average, meaning male advantage remains widespread. The pattern varies sharply by domain: men outperform women in 81.0 percent of economic indicators and 74.3 percent of social relations indicators, while education is the most female-favourable domain, with male prevalence of only 31.7 percent. Health and politics and institutions fall in between. Regional variation in overall male prevalence is comparatively modest, ranging from 51.8 percent in Bolzano to 63.3 percent in Umbria, but within specific domains the spread is much wider, as in politics and institutions, where male prevalence runs from 31.0 percent in Bolzano to 69.0 percent in Basilicata.

On dynamics, the study applied three complementary convergence diagnostics, testing whether lower-scoring regions caught up, whether cross-regional dispersion declined, and whether regional rankings shifted. The results split cleanly along the two dimensions. Well-being shows a short-run catch-up pattern, with lower-scoring regions growing faster and aggregate dispersion declining, the main exception being health. Gender equality tells a different story: while several individual domains display negative catch-up coefficients, aggregate catch-up is not statistically significant and there is no evidence of overall convergence in dispersion. Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic produced only limited reordering of regional positions, with rank correlations between consecutive years remaining close to their long-run averages, 0.973 for well-being and 0.765 for gender equality across the pandemic transition years.

The authors are candid about limitations. The binary women-men structure of the analysis reflects the form in which BES indicators are consistently available at the regional level, a constraint of the empirical setting rather than a claim that gender inequality can be reduced to a binary comparison, a point that resonates with decades of intersectionality scholarship. Missing data affecting 11 of the 64 indicators were handled by carrying forward last available values at the end of series and imputing internal gaps with adjacent observations. The authors also stress that the five regional profiles are an exploratory refinement of a coarser two-cluster structure that statistical diagnostics actually favour, reflecting the dominant separation between higher- and lower-well-being regions.

The broader implication is methodological as much as substantive. Unified gender-sensitive indices, the authors conclude, are useful for communication but tend to obscure the trade-offs between achievement and parity that matter for policy. Keeping regional well-being and gender equality as distinct measurements, while examining their interaction, reveals patterns that a single blended score would hide: a country where average living standards are slowly converging from South to North, but where the geography of gender equality is scattered, multidimensional, and showing no sign of aggregate convergence. As governments worldwide search for alternatives to GDP in the wake of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission and the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals, this Italian experiment offers a template, and a warning, about what happens when equality and achievement are finally counted separately.

Subject of Research: Measurement of regional multidimensional well-being and gender equality in Italy using composite indicators

Article Title: Regional Well-Being and Gender Equality Beyond GDP: A Dual Measurement Framework

Article References: Mariani, M., Pietropaoli, A., & Rughi, T. (2026). Regional Well-Being and Gender Equality Beyond GDP: A Dual Measurement Framework. Social Indicators Research, 185(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-026-03942-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-026-03942-5

Keywords: beyond GDP, multidimensional well-being, gender equality, composite indicators, Italy, regional disparities, BES framework, principal component analysis, convergence analysis, social indicators, Istat, gender gap