Developing Gender StatisticsDraft manual

Gerry BradyCentral Statistics Office

UNECE Gender Statistics

October 6-8, 20081

Presentation overview

• This presentation gives a quick review of the contents of the draft gender statistics manual

• It contains extracts from the manual to give a flavour of the approach taken

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Chapter overview

1. What is gender statistics and gender analysis2. Why do we need gender statistics (GS)3. How to produce GS: General issues4. Selected topics 5. Making it happen6. Improving the use of GS• Annexes

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Chapter 1 - What

1.2 Importance of a gender concern in statistics

1.3 Intersection with other social relations

1.4 Gender Statistics topics

1.5 Making gender visible in statistics

1.6 Gender equality

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Chapter 2 - Why

2.2 Importance of gender statistics (GS)

2.3 Supporting policy development

2.4 Tools for using GS in the policy process

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Chapter 3 - How

3.2 Data sources

3.3 Measurement issues

3.4 Time use surveys

3.5 Measuring minority groups

3.6 Measuring social exclusion

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Chapter 4 - Topics

4.1 Employment

4.2 Entrepreneurship

4.3 Agriculture

4.4 Violence

4.5 Health

4.6 ICT

4.7 Attitudes

4.8 Education

4.9 Assets

4.10 Decision-making

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Chapter 5 – Making it happen

5.1 Dynamics of getting started

5.2 Building alliances

5.3 Top management

5.4 Develop funding

5.5 Legislation

5.6 Defining program

5.7 Organisation of the GS program

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Chapter 6 – Improving the use

6.1 Special applications and analysis

6.2 Marketing

6.3 Dissemination

6.4 UNECE GS database and website

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Chapter 1 – What - Definition

• Gender statistics is an area of statistics which cuts across the traditional fields

• to identify, produce and disseminate statistics that reflect

• the realities of the lives of women and men • and policy issues relating to gender.

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Chapter 1 – What - Synthesis

• Equal pay for work of equal value. This is the most widespread use of the concept of gender equality. It is the simplest and best understood meaning of the concept of gender equality.

• There are several further nuances on the concept of gender equality, including equal opportunities and equity.

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Chapter 2 – Why – Evidence base

• Gender statistics provide the basis to assess differences in the situations of women and men and how conditions are changing or not changing.

• In this way gender statistics raise consciousness and provide the impetus for public debate and change.

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Chapter 2 – Why - Policy

• The interconnection between gender relations/policies and wider social issues is recognised prominently in the Platform for Action:

• ... The advancement of women and the achievement of equality between women and men are a matter of human rights and a condition for social justice and should not be seen in isolation as a women's issue. They are the only way to build a sustainable, just and developed society.

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Chapter 2 – Why – New tools

• Developing effective gender policies requires the assessment of the impact of both proposed and existing policies on women and men.

• New importance has been placed on gender assessments and on a specific form of such assessment, gender budgeting.

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Chapter 3 – How – Data sources

• A wide range of data sources can be used to produce gender statistics. These sources can be grouped into four broad types of national data collection: – population censuses– household sample surveys– business surveys– administrative records

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Chapter 3 – How - Census

• The census has a unique role in an integrated statistical system. By collecting data for the entire population at regular intervals on a range of topics and for small areas and small population groups, the census can provide sample frames and various types of benchmarks for household sample surveys.

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Chapter 3 – How - Modules

• Aims of the 2005 Eurostat LFS module on reconciliation between work and family life were:

• to establish whether the reasons for persons not participating in the labour force are connected with a lack of suitable care services for children and dependant persons

• to analyse the degree of flexibility offered at work in terms of reconciliation with family life

• to estimate how far leave of absence is taken to care for children

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Chapter 3 – How – Men & Women

• The 2005 Personal Safety Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics collected information about experiences of physical and sexual violence, as well as abuse, harassment and people’s feelings of safety within the home and the community.

• This was the first national survey on this topic that obtained information about both women’s and men’s experiences. The previous survey on this topic, in 1996, collected information only on the experiences of women.

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Chapter 3 – How - Business

• Business surveys can provide very valuable information about female and male entrepreneurs and small business owners or managers, including the types of businesses they operate and the success of these businesses.

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Chapter 3 – How - Thresholds

• Coverage issues may be a further area for attention, as many surveys use business size cut-offs. In developing countries, many women work holdings with no or only tiny areas of land.

• In order to measure women’s contribution to agricultural work and to construct a complete picture of holding types, these very small holdings need to be identified and covered either in the census or targeted supplementary surveys.

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Chapter 3 – How - Administrative

• Administrative records are an important source of information for studying gender differences on a wide range of topics.

• In cases where an administrative record system operates effectively throughout a country it can provide frequent data at both national and sub-national levels.

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Chapter 3 – How - Tracking

• The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia compiles justice statistics from 9 regular data collections that obtain data from administrative systems. The reporting units for these collections are public prosecutors offices and courts.

• All criminal offence acts that are stipulated by the criminal law and other legislation dealing with criminal offences are observed.

• The aim of the collections is to follow the criminal offenders through the justice system.

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Chapter 3 – How - Concerns

• Appropriate use of administrative data is an issue to bear in mind. The coverage of an administrative dataset and the definitions it uses are subject to discontinuity as policies, regulations and administrative procedures change. Breaks in series may be unavoidable and invisible.

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Chapter 3 – How - Inventory

• As part of a policy of developing the statistical potential of administrative data across government agencies, the Central Statistics Office in Ireland undertook an examination of social and business survey and administrative data holdings in the main government departments.

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Chapter 3 – How - Linkages

• Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) has created Linked Employer-Employee Data (LEED) to provide insights into the operation of the labour market and its relationship to business performance. LEED draws on administrative data from the taxation system together with business data from SNZ’s Business Frame.

• SNZ produces an annual report based on this linked information.

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Chapter 3 – How - Completeness

• Many household instruments use the concept of household reference person. The relationship of each household member to this person is recorded.

• A more accurate method for mapping household structures is to use a matrix which asks for the relationship of each household member to every other member. This is the approach recommended by the Conference of European Statisticians’ (CES) for the 2010 population censuses (UNECE 2006).

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Chapter 3 – How - Matrix

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Chapter 3 – How - Users

• User advisory groups can be very useful in determining the design and data item content of survey questionnaires, including gender-related aspects.

• One relatively low-cost method for testing whether data item concepts and terminology are appropriate and relevant for both females and males is through focus groups. Focus groups are small groups of people with differing backgrounds that are selected from the target population for a collection.

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Chapter 3 – How - Testing

• Trained methodologists can conduct cognitive interviews, or pretests, with a variety of potential respondents to gauge their understanding of the question. The aim is to ensure that respondents will understand the question in a manner consistent with the survey developer’s intent.

• Pilot tests of draft questionnaires are further tools for ensuring that respondents will be able to supply the information to be collected and for ensuring the appropriateness of the data collection method.

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Chapter 3 – How - Flexibility

• The success of a collection will depend to a large extent on the suitability of the collection methodology. International meetings of gender experts indicate that there is wide variation across countries in effective methods of data collection. These methods include collection of data by telephone, mail, personal visit, and the web, as well as in various types of administrative settings.

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Chapter 3 – How – Time use

• In its 2003 Time Use Survey, Italy used both deterministic rules (involving automatic procedures) and non-automatic rules (applied by a trained staff of coders) to improve the coding of data collected by the survey’s daily diaries.

• Before coding, the words used by respondents to describe their main and parallel activities, activity locations and modes of transport used were recorded in the survey processing system, resulting in a considerable number of strings for each activity.

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Chapter 3 – How - Minorities

• Statistics on the situation of women and men belonging to specific ethnic, religious or national groups are needed to increase visibility and understanding of the issues affecting these groups and the lives of their members.

• Such data are particularly important because gender issues within minority groups are located at an intersection that risks being overlooked by those focusing on gender concerns in general, as well as by those focusing on minority group concerns.

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Chapter 3 – How - Examples

Migration background• Country of birth• Region of birth• Country of birth of

parents• citizenship

Ethnic & cultural• Race• Ethnicity• Ancestry• Religion• Language

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Chapter 3 – How – Social exclusion

• Social exclusion generally refers to a situation where a person does not participate in the normal relationships and activities available to the majority of people in the society in which the person lives. It reflects a lack of connectedness that is multi-dimensional in nature and shaped by the communities, social and physical environments in which they live. It can affect both the quality of life of individuals and the equity and cohesion of society as a whole.

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Chapter 3 – How - Poverty

• The at-risk-of poverty rate for women was 3 percentage points higher than that for men in the EU countries.

• Single parent families – typically single mothers - were much more at risk of poverty and social exclusion than the average.

• Older people, single persons and lone parents were most likely to spend a high proportion of their disposable income (close to 60%) on essential items.

• Immigrant women faced particular challenges - their employment rate in 2005 was 15 percentage points lower than that of their EU national counterparts.

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Chapter 3 – How - Poverty

• Female income from work was increasingly important for the living standards of the household. Analysis of child poverty across the EU indicated that child poverty was 3 to 4 times lower when the mother worked.

• Of 18-24 year olds, women (13%) were less likely than men (18%) to be not in education or training even though they had not completed a qualification beyond lower secondary schooling. The at-risk-of poverty rate was much higher among these early school leavers.

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Chapter 3 – How – Men & Women

• It is important that both female and male perspectives are taken into account when defining the various measures to be produced, developing the data items to be collected and framing questions for respondents to answer.

• Some of the data items used to assess the incidence of different forms of social exclusion can be quite subjective and there is considerable scope for gender bias unless particular care is taken to avoid it.

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Chapter 3 – How - Wealth

• In countries where household income is the major component of economic resources for most households, it is a key determinant of the economic situation of households. However it is not the only economic resource available.

• Households that have higher levels of wealth can utilize these assets to support a higher standard of living. Some countries produce measures that relate to households having both low levels of income and low levels of wealth.

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Chapter 4 – Topics - Structure

4.x.1 What it is4.x.2 Why it is important4.x.3 The value-added of statistics4.x.4 Implications for data collection4.x.5 Further reading

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Chapter 4 – Topics - Employment

Informal self-employment includes:• employers in informal enterprises• own-account workers in informal enterprises• unpaid family workers (in informal and formal

enterprises)• members of informal producers’ cooperatives• own account workers engaged in production of

goods exclusively for own final use by their household.

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Chapter 4 – Topics – Time use

• Time spent on housework: by sex, 2005, Great Britain

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Chapter 4 – Topics - Entrepreneurs

• In order to realise the objectives of further implementing the United Nations global mandate on gender equality by promoting the economics of gender as a factor of sustained growth, it is important to incorporate the gender entrepreneurial dimension in considering all SME and growth polices.

• In order to develop these polices and respond to them there is a need for a clear understanding of the nature of women’s and men’s entrepreneurship and for accurate, comparable, timely and sex disaggregated data on financing, training, regulatory and legal environment of entrepreneurship.

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Chapter 4 – Topics - Coverage

• Systematic underreporting of women farmers’ involvement in agricultural production has occurred especially when censuses focused on commercial rather than on communal or subsistence farming activities and when censuses excluded peri-urban and urban agricultural activities.

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Chapter 4 – Topics – Question set

Has your current partner sometimes behaved violently against you (over the last 12 months or earlier) , such as: 1. Threatened you with violence? 2. Prevented you from moving or grabbed you? 3. Slapped you? 4. Thrown a hard object at you? 5. Beaten you with a fist or a hard objects, or kicked you? 6. Strangled or tried to strangle you? 7. Shot at you or stabbed or cut you with an edged weapon? 8. Beaten your head against something? 9. Pressured, coerced or tried to coerce you to have sex with him?10. Behaved violently against you in some other manner?

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Chapter 4 – Topics – Death rates

Ireland: Age-Sex specific death ratesper 100,000 population

Age group Males Females Male/Female ratio0-4 102 79 1.3 5-14 14 9 1.615-24 80 30 2.725-64 276 177 1.665-74 2,418 1,344 1.875 and over 9,298 7,410 1.3

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Chapter 4 – Topics – Fatalities

EU fatal accidents at work, 1994-1999per 1,000 employees

Category Incidence rateMen 53Women 20Agriculture, hunting and forestry 71Manufacturing 45Electricity, gas and water supply 14Construction 78Wholesale and retail trade 25Hotels and restaurants 37Transport, storage and communication 57Financial intermediation 18

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Chapter 4 – Topics – Question set

Which of the following computer related activities have you already carried out?•Copying or moving a file or folder•Using copy and paste tools to duplicate or move information within a document•Using basic arithmetic formulas in a spreadsheet•Compressing files•Connecting and installing new devices, e.g. a printer•Writing a computer program using a specialised programming language•None of the above

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Chapter 4 – Topics - Attitudes

• The Survey of Canadian Attitudes toward Learning is conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Council on Learning to assess Canadians' needs, opinions and knowledge concerning learning and education. The survey covers four domains that represent learning themes of current importance: early childhood learning, structured learning (elementary, secondary and post secondary), health and learning, and work-related learning.

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Chapter 4 – Topics - Attitudes

• Gender differences are visible as early as second level education when students begin to specialise in subjects. In Ireland, only 0.5% of girls took engineering as a higher level Leaving Certificate examination subject compared to 12.8% of boys. Boys accounted for more than 90% of candidates in technical drawing and construction studies at higher level. In contrast, 31.4% of girls took higher level Home economics compared to just 3% of boys. The effect of differentiation in very specialised subjects at this early stage of the education cycle is likely to be carried into third level education and employment choices.

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Chapter 4 – Topics – Question setThe standard core module for the Demographic and Health Surveys includes the following five questions in the women’s questionnaire:

- Who usually decides how your husband’s/partner’s earnings will be used: you, your husband/partner, or you and your husband/partner jointly?

- Who usually makes decisions about health care for yourself: you, your husband/ partner, you and your husband/ partner jointly, or someone else?

- Who usually makes decisions about making major household purchases?

- Who usually makes decisions about making purchases for daily household needs?

- Who usually makes decisions about visits to your family or relatives?

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Ch. 5 – Making it happen - StepsThis section discusses some specific steps and actions that could comprise an action plan developed to either start or strengthen an existing gender statistics program. Each individual statistical office, of course, must adapt these steps to its particular situation. These steps and actions can be categorized as the following:

•Building Alliances and Meeting Customer Needs•Obtaining Top Management Support•Developing Funding •Legislation•Defining the Program•Organisational Issues

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Ch. 5 – Making it happen - Legal

• The type of details that a law on gender statistics should contain are present in the Italian draft law, which was approved by the previous Government and re-proposed to be considered by the current Parliament. This draft law aims to make visible gender disparities and to ensure equal readability of data relative to both sexes. The provisions of the draft law provide precise indications and directives to producers of statistics as well as identify the areas of interest, the surveys and their periodicity in order to produce sex-disaggregated data.

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Chapter 6 – Improving the use

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Chapter 6 – Improving the use• UNIFEM• Women, Work & Poverty

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Chapter 6 – Improving the use

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Persons 80 & over as % of 65 & over

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