Methodology
Introduction
socioqueeronomics lets you explore how equality for LGBTQ+ people relates to socioeconomic indicators (wealth, human development, life expectancy, and more) across the world's countries. Pick an indicator, look at the map or the scatter chart, and see where a country sits relative to the rest of the world.
The question this site lets you ask is simple: where does LGBTQ+ equality coincide with higher or lower values on a given socioeconomic measure, and where doesn't it? It does not answer why, and it does not claim that either causes the other.
Indicators and definitions
- Equality Index
- Equaldex's headline measure (0 to 100) of how equal a country is for LGBTQ+ people. It is the average of two published components: the Legal Index, which scores laws and rights, and the Public Opinion Index, which scores surveyed attitudes. It combines law on paper with surveyed opinion. It does not measure enforcement, lived experience, or safety, and Equaldex recalculates it continuously rather than publishing an annual series.
- Legal Index
- The legal half of the Equality Index (0 to 100): a weighted score over legal issues such as same-sex marriage, adoption, censorship, discrimination protections, and criminalisation. Laws on the books, not how they are enforced. Sub-national variation is flattened into a single national score.
- Public Opinion Index
- The public-opinion half of the Equality Index (0 to 100), built from surveys of attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people and rights. Survey coverage is uneven: some countries rest on older or thinner polling than others, and stated attitudes can differ from behaviour.
- Civil liberties
- How far a state respects civil liberties in practice (0 to 1): freedom of expression and association, freedom from political killings and torture, and equality before the law. Scored by country experts rather than from the statute book. An expert-coded judgement, not a count of anything, and a national average that can hide how differently the same state treats different groups. It says nothing about LGBTQ+ people specifically — it is the backdrop against which the equality indices should be read.
- Electoral democracy
- How far the ideal of electoral democracy is achieved (0 to 1): whether elections are free and fair, and whether suffrage, elected officials, and freedom of expression and association make them meaningful. Measures the machinery of democracy, not whether minorities fare well under it. Majorities can and do vote against minority rights.
- GDP per capita (PPP)
- Gross domestic product per person, adjusted for purchasing power parity so values are comparable across countries. An average; it says nothing about distribution or inequality within a country.
- GNI per capita
- Gross national income per person converted to US dollars using the World Bank Atlas method. An average that does not reflect within-country distribution.
- GDP
- Total gross domestic product in current US dollars. A measure of economic size, not of individual prosperity or wellbeing.
- Gini index
- How unevenly income is spread within a country, from 0 (everyone earns the same) to 100 (one person earns everything). In practice the observed range is roughly 24 to 60: the most equal countries sit in the high 20s, the least equal in the 50s. Built from household income surveys that run irregularly, so a country's figure can be several years old and two countries' values may not describe the same year — the reference year is shown alongside each value. It describes the shape of the income distribution only, not poverty, wealth, or opportunity.
- Gender Inequality Index
- Loss in human development caused by inequality between women and men, across reproductive health, empowerment, and the labour market. It runs 0 to 1 and counts upwards from parity: 0 means women and men fare equally, and the higher the score the wider the gap. Like the Gini index, the darkest countries on the map are the ones with the most of what it measures — here, the most inequality. Built entirely from a binary of women and men, so it has nothing to say about non-binary or intersex people, and it treats gender inequality as a gap between two groups. Maternal mortality and adolescent birth rates carry a lot of the score, which pulls it toward a health measure in poorer countries.
- HDI
- A summary measure (0 to 1) of average achievement in health, education, and income. A composite; it omits inequality, gender gaps, and environmental factors captured in other UNDP indices.
- IHDI
- The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index: the HDI discounted for how unevenly health, education, and income are spread within a country. Where everyone shares equally it equals the HDI; the further it falls below, the more of that development is concentrated. The gap between HDI and IHDI is the interesting part, and this column does not show it on its own. Not published for every country the HDI covers.
- Life expectancy
- The average number of years a newborn would live if mortality patterns at the time of birth stayed constant. A period estimate, not a prediction for any individual.
- Life satisfaction
- How people rate their own lives, averaged across a country. Respondents are asked to imagine a ladder where the top is the best possible life for them and the bottom the worst, and to say which rung they stand on, from 0 to 10. The figure is a three-year average of survey responses, not a single year's reading, so the year shown is the last year of that window rather than the year of measurement. It asks people to judge their own lives, which makes it a real measure of something no objective indicator captures — and one that reflects what a country's people expect of life as much as what they get.
- Unemployment
- The share of the labour force that is without work but available for and seeking employment (modelled ILO estimate). Definitions of 'seeking work' vary; informal economies are under-counted.
- Religious diversity
- The projected percentage of the 2050 population that does not belong to the single largest religious group. Higher means more plural. A projection, not an observation, and a crude diversity proxy: it says nothing about how groups relate to one another.
- Dominant religion
- The religious group projected to hold the largest share of a country's population in 2050, under Pew's main projection scenario. Largest does not mean majority: a plurality can be well under 50%. It is a projection made in 2015 from 2010 baseline data.
Data
Generated from the same dataset the site is built from, so this table can't drift from what's actually deployed.
Where each source comes from
Equaldex Equality Index
Retrieved from Equaldex's official Equality Index API at build time, not scraped and not copied from a mirror. The API returns three scores per country: the Equality Index (the headline figure, used for the map's default view and for the chart's X axis), the Legal Index, and the Public Opinion Index. All three are shown here as Equaldex publishes them, with no rescaling.
Equaldex recalculates the index continuously as its underlying records are corrected and expanded, and asks that the score not be presented as a historical time series. This site therefore shows one current value per country and labels it with the date it was retrieved, rather than implying an annual release. Equaldex's terms permit non-commercial use with attribution and a link back, which is what the entry in the attribution list below and the link in this paragraph provide.
Pew Research Center religion projections
The dominant religion and religious diversity figures are the 2050 projection from Pew Research Center's report "The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050" (published 2 April 2015). Specifically, they come from the appendix table "Religious Composition by Country, 2010 and 2050", which covers every country and territory with at least 100,000 people as of 2010.
Pew publishes that table only inside the report PDF, so this site parses it out of the PDF rather than transcribing it by hand: the parser is committed alongside the site (scripts/extract-pew.mjs), which makes the extraction reviewable and re-runnable if Pew reissues the report. For each country the largest projected 2050 group becomes "Dominant religion", its share becomes "Dominant religion share", and 100 minus that share becomes "Religious diversity". Pew prints shares below 0.1% as "< 0.1"; those are read as 0.05, which never changes which group is largest.
Two things worth holding in mind. These are projections published in 2015 from a 2010 baseline, not observations, so they carry all the uncertainty of a demographic model. And "dominant" means largest, not majority: a country's largest group can sit well under 50%, which is exactly what the diversity figure is there to show.
World Bank and UNDP
The six World Bank indicators are fetched live from the World Bank API at build time, each using that country's most recent available value. For most of them that is last year's figure. The Gini index is the exception: household income surveys run irregularly, so a country's newest reading can be several years old and two countries' values may not describe the same year, which is why each value is labelled with its own.
The Human Development Index, its inequality-adjusted counterpart, and the Gender Inequality Index all come from the UNDP Human Development Report's published composite-indices dataset: one file, one reference year, three indices. The UNDP also offers a keyed API for the HDI, and the build will use it when a key is configured; without one it reads the same figures from the committed dataset, so a fresh clone of this site always builds.
Read the Gender Inequality Index the way you read the Gini index: it counts upwards from parity. Zero means women and men fare equally, and the higher the score the wider the gap, so the darkest countries on the map are the least equal ones. It is also built entirely from a binary of women and men, and so has nothing to say about non-binary or intersex people.
Life satisfaction, and the two V-Dem indices
Life satisfaction is the Cantril ladder question from the World Happiness Report, which asks people to place their own life on a ladder from 0 to 10. Civil liberties and electoral democracy are expert-coded indices from V-Dem. All three are read from Our World in Data's published extracts rather than the original files, for one practical reason: OWID puts an ISO country code on every row, where the World Happiness Report's own file names countries in prose and codes none of them. The figures are the upstream figures, and the upstream authors are who this page credits.
One wrinkle worth knowing about the happiness figure: it is a three-year average of survey responses, labelled with the last year of that window rather than the year of any one survey. A handful of countries were also last polled some years ago — Cuba's most recent reading is from 2011 — and those are shown as they are, with their own year, rather than quietly refreshed or dropped.
V-Dem codes political entities rather than present-day states, so its files also contain places that no longer exist under codes that modern countries now use — the Papal States, which end in 1870, share a code with the Vatican. The build discards any reading more than a decade behind the rest of the file, so this site shows a V-Dem score only where there is a current one. That is why the Vatican has none.
Method
- Countries are matched across sources by their ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code.
- Every indicator value carries its own reference year. There is no single global "as of" date for the site, because the sources themselves don't share one.
- The scatter chart shows association between two indicators, not causation. A trend line, when shown, summarises that association; it does not imply either indicator causes the other.
- No imputation or modelling is performed on top of the source data. A missing value is shown as "No data" everywhere on the site. It is never estimated, interpolated, or treated as zero.
- Map colours use six quantile bins rather than a continuous ramp, so each shade holds roughly the same number of countries and the legend can be read honestly.
- Darker means more, never better. The map's colour always runs with the number, so the darkest countries are the ones with the highest value, whether that value is a good thing or a bad one. Whether more is welcome is carried by the colour itself: the measures where a high score is the bad news — unemployment, income inequality, gender inequality — are shaded in a warning red rather than the greens and blues used for things you would want more of. The legend under the map prints the real range, lowest value on the left.
- The map is an orthographic globe, drawn from the same country outlines at every rotation. A globe has no area or shape distortion to correct for, unlike the flat projections that stretch the far north and south; the trade-off is that only the hemisphere facing you is visible, so drag to bring the rest round. Selecting a country anywhere on the site spins the globe to it.
- On the chart, each category has both its own colour and its own marker shape, so the groups stay distinguishable for colour-blind readers and in greyscale.
Attribution and licensing
- Equaldex (Equaldex terms: non-commercial use, attribution and link back required)
- V-Dem, via Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0)
- World Bank (CC BY 4.0)
- UNDP Human Development Report (CC BY 3.0 IGO)
- World Happiness Report, via Our World in Data (World Happiness Report, free to download with attribution; underlying survey © Gallup)
- World Bank / ILO (CC BY 4.0)
- Pew Research Center (Pew terms: attribution required)
Country flags come from the open-source flag-icons project and are served from this site rather than a third-party CDN.
Limitations
- Legal equality on paper is not the same as lived experience. A high Equality Index score does not mean LGBTQ+ people in that country are safe, accepted, or free from discrimination day to day.
- The Equality Index blends law and surveyed opinion into one number. The Legal Index and Public Opinion Index are available separately on this site precisely because those two things can pull in opposite directions.
- Public-opinion coverage is uneven between countries: some scores rest on recent, large surveys and others on older or thinner polling.
- Religion figures are 2050 projections published in 2015, not current observations.
- The most recent economic figures (GDP, GDP per capita, GNI per capita) are estimates.
- Not every indicator here is the same kind of measurement. GDP is counted, life satisfaction is what people say about their own lives, and the civil liberties and electoral democracy scores are the judgement of country experts. They sit in the same table and the same colour bins, but they do not carry the same kind of certainty.
- None of the general indicators is specific to LGBTQ+ people. A country's life satisfaction, civil liberties, or gender inequality score describes its population as a whole, and a national average can be perfectly respectable while a minority within it fares badly.
- National averages hide everything happening inside a country. Sub-national variation, in law and in attitudes alike, is not captured anywhere on this site.
socioqueeronomics matches countries by ISO3 code and performs no modelling of its own. See Explore to look at the data directly.