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BackgroundDuring 1992-1996, UNIFEM supported three projects to improve statistics on gender issues in the Asia-Pacific Region, and a fourth project to evaluate the results of these projects:
The ProjectsThe development goal of all projects was to improve the availability of sex-disaggregated statistics and gender statistics in the national statistical systems of the participating countries. The projects provided training to enhance the capacity of staff in the statistics offices and in the main sectors to collect, tabulate and analyze sex-disaggregated data and statistics on gender issues. Participants included both producers and users of gender statistics. Representatives from the national women's office, union or ministry in government and women from NGOs and women researchers were also included to provide technical support in defining gender issues. The main producers of gender statistics were the staff from the national statistics office in each country. The users included staff from key sectors such as agriculture, education, health, labour, and planning agencies, as well from the women's groups who needed to analyze and use gender statistics for policy advocacy. In each country teams were formed from among producer and user groups to produce three documents:
At the commencement of the projects, the eight countries varied in terms of the production, dissemination and utilization or gender statistics. However, the review of gender concerns and the capacity of national statistical systems to monitor these revealed that all project countries lacked the data needed to enable policy makers and planners to develop and implement appropriate responses to the main gender issues. Population and agriculture censuses, household surveys and administrative records collected most individual-level data in terms of the sex of the respondent. However, sex-disaggregated data were often not processed, and even if processed were not tabulated, disseminated or analyzed. The reasons for this included lack of awareness, lack of technical capacity and lack of resources. What are Gender Statistics?The term gender statistics refers to two separate but related dimensions of statistical data: disaggregation by sex for all individual-level statistics to show the different roles and activities of women and men; and the specific collection of statistics that relate to important gender issues. Depending on individual country circumstances, these might include statistics on unpaid domestic work and childcare, gender-based violence on women, trafficking in women, and/or migrant women workers. In the past, statistics offices and researchers have presented only aggregate labour force data, for example, for the entire population. However, labour force participation for women (defined as the proportion of the total population of women aged 15-60 who are actually in the work force) is usually much lower than for men. Similarly, the distribution of the male and female labour force by sector is usually quite different. In many countries, a higher proportion of the female labour force is employed in the service sector, while a higher proportion of the male labour force is employed in industry, and particularly in heavy industries. There are also clear differences by occupation, with some "feminized" occupations such as teaching or nursing being dominated by women while others, such as engineering, tend to be dominated by men. A consequence of the failure to recognize and routinely distinguish the different patterns for women and men is that the situation of men tends to be regarded as the norm or standard, and the different situation of women is overlooked. Furthermore, policies and programmes may be based on stereotypes that are significantly different from the empirical reality. For example, agricultural programmes continue to assume that "farmers are men" even in countries such as Thailand and Vietnam where sex-disaggregated data show that a majority of farmers in many rural areas are actually women. For these reasons, the early work on gender statistics focused primarily on ensuring that individual-level data are collected, tabulated, presented and analyzed by sex. While sex disaggregation is important, it is not sufficient because traditional statistical systems have collected data on the issues that government officials and development analysts - most of whom were men - considered to be important. Issues that are important to women rather than men were overlooked. As a result, most developing countries do not collect data on issues such as domestic violence or on unpaid household and domestic work and child care. Thus, later work on gender statistics has also encouraged statistical agencies to collect data on gender issues and has provided technical support for the collection of data on Violence Against Women and on Time Use, which shows how much time women and men spend on paid work, unpaid household work, child care, recreation, commuting etc. Why Gender Statistics?As noted above, failure to disaggregate statistics by sex meant that the differences between women and men were largely overlooked in the design and implementation of development policies, plans and programmes. In particular, women's specific needs tended to be neglected. Thus, gender statistics were essential in order to assist policy makers and planners and development projects and programmes to identify and meet women's needs equally with those of men. Implementing the ProjectsIn all eight countries, the national statistical office implemented the projects. Other stakeholders were involved through the project steering committees, the national working group and participation in workshops, and national and regional training. Their support was recognized as critical to ensuring support for gender statistics among policy makers and planners. A key project strategy was dialogue and networking between the producers of gender statistics, and the users of those statistics - a total of three were held in Indonesia and China and two in each of the six countries in the regional project. Both producers and users were involved in the national working groups, as well as representatives from the national women's agency, and women's NGOs. Funding and personnel for technical support for the regional and the China projects was provided by Statistics Sweden, while staff from the Indonesian country project also participated in the regional workshops organized by ESCAP. The booklets "Women and Men in [Country]" were modeled on the very successful publication Women and Men in Sweden produced by Statistics Sweden.
The Indonesian booklet was markedly different from the other countries and from the original Swedish model. Although Women and Men in Sweden had been designed for use by the general public, the Indonesian Working Group realized that the graphic presentations were too sophisticated for the same target group in Indonesia. The Indonesian Working Group defined their target group as those with at least three years of secondary education, which would include most government officials even at the local level. They then designed a pictorial format to present the data on women and men in Indonesia in ways that most Indonesians would find easy to understand. They field tested the first draft on bus conductors, women vendors in a provincial market, and local government, and then launched the English version of the booklet in time for the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. The first edition of the publication has since been reprinted twice and two new editions printed primarily with government funding.
The Indonesian project was also innovative in integrating the training methodology and curriculum developed under the project into a one-month gender statistics workshop for fifty new graduates of the Academy of Statistics of the national statistics office, most of whom were to be posted in provincial statistical offices. The project also provided several sessions on gender statistics to demographers from nineteen provincial statistical offices. As a result, in addition to the national booklet on Women and Men in Indonesia produced with funding from the UNIFEM project, publications on Women and Men in each province were also produced with funding from the provincial statistics offices. In addition to these booklets, the Indonesian project published in 2001 a more technical version Statistics on Gender Issues in Indonesia for use by researchers as well as staff in government planning agencies. An accompanying and attractively presented advocacy Briefing Kit on Gender Issues in Indonesia specifically targets policy makers. At the 2001 final review of the project, the statistics office sought - and was given - permission to publish these for sale to the general public through a national cooperative distribution network in order to more widely disseminate the output of the project. The Chinese project also involved statisticians from five provinces, and the production of booklets on Women and Men in those five provinces, as well as a summary poster covering all the provinces of China. Women and Men in China was also launched prior to the Beijing Conference, where it was distributed in English.
The regional project executed by the ESCAP Statistics Division provided technical support to the six participating countries through a project expert based in the Division, as well as Division staff. The Division also produced a regional booklet on Women and Men in Asia-Pacific, based on the output of the participating countries as well as the Division's own data base. Through the Statistics Division and the participating countries, gender statistics was placed as a standing item on the agenda of the Regional Statistics Committee, a very strategic body that influences statistical standards and policies for the entire ESCAP region. The Division acts as the Secretariat to the Committee, which meets every two years and is made up of representatives - usually the Heads - of each of the national statistics offices in the region. This was an important mechanism for expanding the impact of the project beyond the countries that were directly involved. Results: were Gender Statistics improved? Not all the gains in gender statistics achieved after the project implementation in each country can be attributed solely to the UNIFEM gender statistics projects. However, the projects have undoubtedly contributed to the steady improvement in the generation, dissemination and utilization of gender statistics in the eight countries. Amongst the concrete results, the statistical booklets on women and men produced by the UNIFEM project were important milestones in the improvement of gender statistics in the eight countries. The institutional commitment of the national statistical offices to generating and disseminating gender statistics is evidenced by the number that continue to publish national versions of Statistics on Women in Men with their own funding. Re-printing and updating by the countries from national budgets indicates that the publications have been both useful and in demand. The ESCAP regional publication on Women and Men in Asia-Pacific has provided useful comparative data for the region as a whole, including the countries participating in the UNIFEM project. Getting gender statistics as a standing item on the agenda of the Regional Statistics Committee for Asia-Pacific provides an avenue for institutionalizing the achievements of the project in the region as a whole. However, although women's agencies, researchers and gender advocates in NGOs have a stronger understanding of the importance of statistics in their work and are better able to articulate their data requirements, utilization of gender statistics in policy analysis, policy formulation and programme monitoring remains limited. While this partly reflects a failure to utilize statistics in general, evaluation of the projects also revealed that most of the "users" represented in the national working groups were actually producers of statistics from the various sectors, such as the staff from the school statistics section of the Department of Education, and those responsible for health system statistics in the Department of Health. Their participation in the project was certainly beneficial in generating better gender statistics in the sectors, but the policy analysts, planners and policy makers originally identified as "users" were largely missing. As a result, further work by UNIFEM and ESCAP on gender statistics will focus more on training those who should be using gender statistics on how to use gender statistics for policy analysis, as well as for advocacy. UNIFEM is now working to extend its work on gender statistics into new areas. |
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