Despite decades of investment in promoting gender equality, gender data gaps continue to impede our understanding of the lived experiences of women and girls. A lack of sex-disaggregated data encumbers efforts to craft and monitor the effectiveness of evidence-based policies that address gender inequalities.
To realize gender equality, the conversation must shift from identifying gender data problems to finding practical solutions to gender data gaps. That’s why this new report focuses on innovative approaches, matching solutions to problems, and presenting the acquired knowledge to encourage uptake and effective data use.
To make good on our promise to leave no one behind, the development data community must identify, adopt, and scale solutions to fill persistent gender data gaps. Only with timely, accurate, and disaggregated data will we be able to hold ourselves accountable and ultimately achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
This new report and its accompanying Gender Data Solutions Inventory documents 142 solutions that have emerged in the last five years across seven areas of development: economic opportunities, education, environment, health, human security, public participation, and cross-domain solutions which span across the previous categories. Promising examples from economic opportunities, environment, and health domains are highlighted below.
"The solutions associated with economic opportunities increase production of gender data on economic empowerment, financial inclusion, information and communications technology, work including unpaid housework and care work, time use, and employment."
Integrating new modules on asset ownership and access to information and communications technology (ICT) into household surveys is key to better gender-relevant data on economic opportunities while the harmonization of labor force surveys can ensure the consistency of measuring men and women’s work.
“Without such gender data, policymakers, researchers, and development practitioners are unable to address how and where women and girls are differentially affected by a lack of access to water and sanitation, lack of rights to agricultural land, the impacts of natural disasters, or even how many women participate in environmental decision-making.”
Solutions in the environment sector, such as gender-sensitive assessments and The Women’s Environment and Development Organization’s (WEDO) Gender Climate Tracker, help produce more gender data in the aftermath of disasters, for land rights and agriculture, and on leadership in government service.
“The solutions associated with health would produce more data on cause-of-death, access to health care services, sexual and reproductive health and rights, child health, gender-based violence, and morbidity.”
To strengthen cause-of-death reporting and better understand what women are dying from, where and why, integrating verbal autopsies into civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems and standardizing femicide data are solutions that are currently being used across the globe.
Several solutions cut across all six development areas. This includes training and employing female enumerators to collect gender-sensitive data, using rapid gender assessments in times of health, environmental and humanitarian crises, and complementing official statistics with big data or social media analyses.
In addition to solutions that close gender data gaps by improving data production, this report also identifies solutions that do so by creating an enabling environment for gender data to thrive. These actions span from sustainable financing to open data and are critical for long-term change. Not only do they encourage gender data use and uptake, but the solutions also aim to strengthen the linkages between data, policy, and impact.
But the implementation of these identified solutions – whether they produce more gender data or create an enabling environment to do so – cannot fall only to gender data focal points or ministries of social welfare; they must be borne in partnership by a range of actors working together to close gaps and strengthen gender data systems. This is underscored by the report’s finding as nearly every solution identified requires multiple actors for successful implementation.
To effectively close gender data gaps and create a better enabling environment, actors within the national statistical system should work in partnership with local and global stakeholders to take these ten steps forward.
This report, and its accompanying inventory, offers a wide range of innovations and new practices to improve gender data collection and deliver on our promise to leave no one behind. By increasing the availability of gender data, we will be better equipped to monitor progress on the SDGs and assess the impact of new policies to improve the lives of women and girls.