Developing%20Gender%20Statistics%20Draft%20manual

1
Developing Gender StatisticsDraft manual

• Gerry Brady
• Central Statistics Office
• UNECE Gender Statistics
• October 6-8, 2008

2
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

3
Chapter overview

• 1. What is gender statistics and gender analysis
• 2. Why do we need gender statistics (GS)
• 3. How to produce GS General issues
• 4. Selected topics
• 5. Making it happen
• 6. Improving the use of GS
• Annexes

4
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

5
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

6
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

7
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

8
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

9
Chapter 6 Improving the use

• 6.1 Special applications and analysis
• 6.2 Marketing
• 6.3 Dissemination
• 6.4 UNECE GS database and website

10
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.

11
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.

12
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.

13
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.

14
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.

15
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

16
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.

17
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

18
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
  peoples feelings of safety within the home and
  the community.
• This was the first national survey on this topic
  that obtained information about both womens and
  mens experiences. The previous survey on this
  topic, in 1996, collected information only on the
  experiences of women.

19
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.

20
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 womens 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.

21
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.

22
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.

23
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.

24
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.

25
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 SNZs Business
  Frame.
• SNZ produces an annual report based on this
  linked information.

26
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).

27
Chapter 3 How - Matrix
28
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.

29
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
  developers 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.

30
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.

31
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 surveys 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.

32
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.

33
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

34
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.

35
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.

36
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.

37
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.

38
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.

39
Chapter 4 Topics - Structure

• 4.x.1 What it is
• 4.x.2 Why it is important
• 4.x.3 The value-added of statistics
• 4.x.4 Implications for data collection
• 4.x.5 Further reading

40
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.

41
Chapter 4 Topics Time use

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

42
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 womens and mens entrepreneurship
  and for accurate, comparable, timely and sex
  disaggregated data on financing, training,
  regulatory and legal environment of
  entrepreneurship.

43
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.

44
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?

45
Chapter 4 Topics Death rates
Ireland Age-Sex specific death rates Ireland Age-Sex specific death rates Ireland Age-Sex specific death rates Ireland Age-Sex specific death rates
per 100,000 population per 100,000 population
Age group Males Females Male/Female ratio
0-4 102 79 1.3
5-14 14 9 1.6
15-24 80 30 2.7
25-64 276 177 1.6
65-74 2,418 1,344 1.8
75 and over 9,298 7,410 1.3
46
Chapter 4 Topics Fatalities
EU fatal accidents at work, 1994-1999 EU fatal accidents at work, 1994-1999
per 1,000 employees per 1,000 employees
Category Incidence rate
Men 53
Women 20
Agriculture, hunting and forestry 71
Manufacturing 45
Electricity, gas and water supply 14
Construction 78
Wholesale and retail trade 25
Hotels and restaurants 37
Transport, storage and communication 57
Financial intermediation 18
47
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

48
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.

49
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.

50
Chapter 4 Topics Question set

• The standard core module for the Demographic and
  Health Surveys includes the following five
  questions in the womens questionnaire
• - Who usually decides how your husbands/partners
  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?

51
Ch. 5 Making it happen - Steps

• This 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

52
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.

53
Chapter 6 Improving the use
54
Chapter 6 Improving the use

• UNIFEM
• Women, Work Poverty

55
Chapter 6 Improving the use
56
Persons 80 over as of 65 over