WUNRN
United Nations Department of Economic & Social Affairs – UN DESA
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/gender/using-data-to-measure-gender-equality.html
Using Data to Measure Gender Equality
4
November 2014, New York
As we
approach the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for
Action, which set out principles and goals for achieving gender equality and
empowering women, how far has the world come in realizing this vision and in
improving the status of women around the world? To assess progress made in
improving the lives of women and men, the production and use of relevant,
accurate and timely gender statistics is critical.
Recognizing
the importance of appropriate data for designing policies and assessing
progress towards the goal of gender equality, the Beijing Platform for Action
requested national, regional and international statistical services to “ensure
that statistics related to individuals are collected, compiled, analyzed and
presented by sex and age and reflect problems, issues and questions related to
women and men in society”. It is through the collection, production, analysis
and use of gender statistics that policy makers and development practitioners
can begin to properly address the specific issues of women and men.
Gender
statistics are not just relevant for monitoring the status of women. They can
also be used to shed light on specific issues relating to men, such as men’s
risk of accidents, harmful use of tobacco and alcohol, and access to paid
paternity leave. Ideally, gender statistics should be used to inform all
policies and programmes, so that gender issues are mainstreamed and policies
are designed to enable the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights by
women and men. The inclusion of a stand-alone goal on “achieving gender
equality and empower all women and girls” in the Outcome document of the Open
Working Group (OWG) for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in
New York in July 2014, reinforces the importance of this issue and will likely
increase the demand for gender statistics that reflect the differences between
men and women in society.
Gender
statistics – challenges at every stage
Critical as they are to designing effective policies and programmes, the production
of gender statistics presents significant challenges to National Statistical
Systems (NSSs) in many countries and many data gaps exist, particularly in
areas such as poverty, time use, violence against women, and the environment.
“There is an urgent need to improve statistical systems to ensure the full
mainstreaming of gender into data production, analysis and dissemination and
increase the availability of gender statistics for national and international
monitoring,” said Stefan Schweinfest, Director of UN DESA’s Statistics
Division, as he addressed a Gender Statistics Workshop in Fiji in August this
year.
“There is an urgent need to improve statistical systems to
ensure the full mainstreaming of gender into data production, analysis and
dissemination and increase the availability of gender statistics for national
and international monitoring”
Stefan Schweinfest
Director of UN DESA’s Statistics Division
Gender
statistics means more than just sex-disaggregated data, although in some cases
this can be a challenge in itself. Producing gender statistics also means
collecting and analysing data that address specific issues that may affect
women more than men (or vice versa), as well as incorporating a gender
dimension into data collection processes so that the experiences of all women
and men are properly captured and gender biases are avoided.
It is
important to note that while sex refers to the biological differences between
women and men, gender refers to the social constructs of being ‘male’ or
‘female’, which can vary over time and across cultures.
One of
the major challenges in producing gender statistics is that they are often seen
as addressing a ‘women’s issue’ and become marginalized instead of
mainstreamed, with no clear institutional arrangements in place to coordinate
their production and limited resources dedicated to data collection and
dissemination.
For
instance, from a global review of national gender statistics programmes,
undertaken by the UN DESA’s Statistics Division in collaboration with the UN
regional commissions in 2012, out of 126 responding countries only 13 percent
had a specific budget allocated to gender statistics within the overall national
budget for statistics, 47 percent relied on ad-hoc/project funds and the
remaining 39 percent had no funds at all.
In some
cases data are available but they are not used to produce gender statistics, or
gender statistics are produced but they are not presented in a way that
facilitates clear understanding of gender issues and differences. Another
significant challenge relates to the need to address gender equality and
women’s empowerment for different demographic and social groups.
Life-cycle
analyzes of gender equality suggest that women and girls face different
constraints that can be age-specific or may be specific to different
socio-economic groups. Disaggregated statistics along these lines should be
promoted as well as a renewed effort to fully analyze existing survey data, and
to invest in other data sources, including administrative records.
Guidelines
on how to collect data on violence against women
In many cases, gender issues are emerging issues for which there are few
international standards for countries to follow. In the case of violence
against women, a relatively new area of research, guidelines on how best to
collect data are only recently being established.
This
sensitive issue requires unique approaches to data collection, which take into
account key issues of safety and ethics. Specialized training is required for
interviewers to enable them to build rapport with respondents and gain their
trust, so that respondents feel able to open up on this personal and often
traumatic topic.
UN DESA’s
Statistics Division recently published Guidelines on Producing Statistics on
Violence Against Women – Statistical Surveys, which provides information
for countries looking to collect data on this underreported area according to
internationally agreed standards facilitating cross-country comparisons.
Working
to improve gender statistics
To work towards meeting these challenges, the UN Statistical Commission
established the Global Gender Statistics Programme, coordinated by the
Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Gender Statistics (IAEG-GS) and implemented by
UN DESA’s Statistics Division and key partner agencies.
The
overall goal is to enhance the capacity of countries to collect, disseminate
and use reliable statistics and indicators to assess the relative situation of
women and men in gender-sensitive, policy-relevant areas. It focuses on:
strengthening national capacity for the production, dissemination and use of
gender relevant statistics; developing and promoting methodological guidelines
and addressing emerging issues of gender concern; facilitating access to data;
and improving coherence among existing initiatives on gender statistics through
international coordination.
One
recent achievement is the establishment of a Minimum Set of Gender Indicators
comprised of 52 quantitative and 11 qualitative indicators. These indicators
address the key policy concerns identified in the Beijing Platform for Action
and represent a significant step forward in identifying priorities in the
production of harmonized gender statistics and facilitating national, regional
and international assessment of progress towards gender equality.
Taking stock and moving forward
As part
of the Global Gender Statistics Programme, a series of Global Forums have taken
place around the world to bring together both users and producers of gender
statistics. The upcoming 5th Global Forum on Gender Statistics, to be held in
Aguascalientes, Mexico, from 3-5 November, in collaboration with Mexico’s
Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI), will bring together over
100 experts to evaluate current international standards, share best practice at
the national and international levels and discuss on-going initiatives to
strengthen gender statistics.
The Forum
will focus on issues related to measuring and monitoring gender equality in the
following ‘thematic pillars’: women and the economy; violence against women;
time use; political participation; the environment; and women in armed
conflicts. It will provide an opportunity to assess the current status of
gender statistics and how they can be further strengthened so as to best inform
policies aiming at improving the lives of women and men around the world.