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http://www.scidev.net/global/gender/news/genders-stats-gaining-momentum.html
Gender Statistics Gaining Momentum But Much More Progress Needed
[NEW YORK] As the UN’s Beijing+20 summit came to an end
last week, two UN statisticians told SciDev.Net that statistics on
women’s development issues are finally making it onto the international agenda —
though there is still much to do.
Twenty years ago 189 countries ratified the Beijing Declaration and Platform
for Action in which they agreed to empower women. Yet at the summit this month
(9–20 March), officially the UN’s 59th Commission on the Status of Women,
statisticians said that, despite progress, proper collection of gender-related statistics is
still a big challenge.
The disaggregation of gender statistics from development data is a particularly
crucial issue for two of the main tenets of the 1995 declaration: preventing
violence against women and women’s economic empowerment.
Keiko Osaki-Tomita, chief of the Demographic and Social Statistics Branch of
the UN Statistics Division (UNSD), says the issue didn’t gain momentum
initially due to a combination of political ignorance, non-publication of
collected data, and the complexity of coordinating data across government
agencies and ministries.
But Masako Hiraga, a statistician in the World Bank’s Development Data Group,
says data for gender-specific issues has now gained traction among UN member
states.
She says the UN Working Group’s report A world that counts, published in
November 2014, requires that “gender is not an add-on. It should be part of
[all data] and we should be able to disaggregate it for analysis and
understanding.”
Guidance Needed
At the summit last week Osaki-Tomita presented Guidelines for Producing
Statistics on Violence Against Women, which she says she created in
response to an increased demand from UN member states for data collection
guidance.
Governments are eager to learn more about
violence rates but unclear how to measure it beyond anecdotal evidence, says
Osaki-Tomita. Violence is a sensitive issue, so the guidelines outline how to
design surveys to deal with the confidentiality and protection of respondents,
and the psychological readiness of surveyors, she says.
But gender statistics cover far more than violence against women and girls. For
instance, both Hiraga and Osaki-Tomita say that a lack of accurate data on
unpaid work is a hindrance to women’s economic development.
Agricultural work is often disregarded by female survey respondents they do not
consider it ‘work’, says Hiraga. There are also gaps in data on the economic
impact of time spent on water collection by women and girls. Similarly, there
are few reliable statistics on female asset ownership as legal documents are
often in male relatives’ names.
Another difficult area is women’s entrepreneurship and that fact that business
licenses held by women may not cover activities such as tailoring and
childcare, or market stalls. Osaki-Tomita says that women are likely to have a
much larger role in the informal sector than many countries realize.
For Hiraga, integrating this kind of gender-specific focus into overall data
collection is a must for sustainable development. The World Bank, UNSD and
regional banks are collaborating to build up data collection capacity in many developing
countries by training statisticians and funding specific data gathering
projects.
The Sustainable Development Goals will need a lot of data, says Osaki-Tomita,
so ensuring that national statistics offices can handle the workload is
essential to measuring the success or failure of the goals.