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Euro-Mediterranean Statistical Co-operation Programme
Contract: ENPI/2010/234-479
Mission Report
SOCIAL Statistics
Subject / Work session and workshop on Gender STATISTICSCountries / Eight ENP South Partner Countries
Participants / 14 Participants
Dates & Venue / 12-15 March 2012
UN-Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE), Geneva, Switzerland
External contributors / M. Klas RYDENSTAM, Senior Short-Term Expert in Time Use surveys, Freelance
Mrs. Adriana MATA-GREENWOOD,, Senior Statistician, ILO
Document’s identity:
Author / M. Bahjat ACHIKBACHE, Key Expert for Social Statistics, Medstat IIIRecipient(s) / EuropeAid: M. Christophe INGELS, Mrs. Lucia SANTUCCIONE;
ESTAT: Mrs. Rosemary MONTGOMERY, M. Edward COOK;
ENP South Countries: Directors Generals, Principal & Sector Coordinators;
M. Victor VIKAT, UN-Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE), Geneva, Switzerland;
External contributors: M. Klas RYDENSTAM, Senior Short-Term Expert in Time Use surveys; Mrs. Adriana MATA-GREENWOOD, Senior Statistician, ILO
Date / 26 April 2012
1) Introduction
In accordance with the Terms of References approved by the European Commission on the 21st December 2011, the Social Statistics Sector of Medstat III programme cooperated with the Social and Demographic Statistical Division of the UN-ECE and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to organise 2012 edition of the Work Session on Gender Statistics which was held from 12 to 14 March 2012, and followed by a workshop on Gender Labour statistics and Time-use surveys on 15 March 2012. The meeting was held at the UN Headquarters, at the Palais des Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Accordingly, the General Directors of the National Statistical Institutes in the eight Medstat III partner countries (excluding Syria) were invited by mail to nominate two candidates with the following profile:
Ø One senior statistician from the National Statistical Institute (NSI), head of the gender unit, responsible for producing and disseminating Gender related statistics; and
Ø One data user selected from the national users’ community who is concerned with Gender issues.
In the information letters, we specified that the participants would be invited to prepare and to present papers and PowerPoint presentations related to the subject matter. It was agreed with the UN-ECE that the contributions by participants from the Medstat programme would be first reviewed and validated by the Key Expert of the Social Statistics Sector and then submitted to the organisers of the Work Session for inclusion in the agenda.
In addition, the two External contributors were asked to prepare a questionnaire that was eventually submitted to the participants, with the purpose of better understanding the national context in the two statistical themes on the last day agenda (see annexe 3).
Similarly, the two External contributors were asked to prepare a twenty-minute classroom practical exercise to be submitted to the participants during the last day workshop.
2) Objectives and agenda of the meeting
The overall objective of the meeting was to provide the opportunity for the participants to exchange with their colleagues from countries members of the UNECE about their experiences on gender statistics and to discuss international statistical work in this area.
There were two specific objectives of the meeting:
a) Participate in the UNECE work session on gender statistics to learn about progress made in the member countries and international organisations involved in the area of gender statistics, and to share their national experience in gender statistic,
Items on the agenda:
Ø Gender pay gap
Ø Time use surveys
Ø Measuring violence against women
Ø Health and lifestyles
Ø Gender analysis of census data
Ø Gender perspective in migration statistics
Ø Indicators of gender equality
b) Learn about the gender dimension in labour statistics and about the Time-Use Survey methodology,
3) Organisation of the meeting
The meeting was divided into two main parts:
a) The work session - during the first 3 days - covered a host of topics related to gender statistics. It was attended by representatives from member States of the UN-ECE, international organisations as well as international experts specialised in the domain.
b) The thematic workshop - during the last day - was devoted to exploring the specifics about gender related Labour statistics. A total of 28 participants including 14 participants from member states of the UN-ECE who expressed interest in the workshop, and all 14 participants from the Mediterranean partner countries, attended the thematic workshop. Participants were organised for each of the morning and afternoon sessions in four groups, according to their working languages, and were asked to do a 20-minute practical exercise.
Interpretation services were provided by the UN-ECE to all participants in three languages: English, French and Russian.
4) Participants and Contributors to the workshop
The participants
Fourteen participants registered in the workshop, including two from each of Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, and Palestine, and one participant from each Lebanon and Tunisia. The participants were equally distributed between users and producers of social/gender statistics. Overall, participants were very interested in the subject-matter and displayed a very lively interaction during the discussions.
Four countries presented papers in the relevant sessions in the agenda. Egypt presented two papers on Gender Pay Gap and on the Gender Analysis of Population Census; Jordan presented a paper on Male-Female Pay Differences; and Israel a paper on the Promotion of Employees in the Workplace: are men promoted more than women?
The contributors
Two first-class international experts specialised in gender issues were mobilised to present and discuss relevant methodologies for designing and analysing gender related indicators. These experts were:
v Mrs. Adriana MATA-GREENWOOD, senior statistician from the ILO, presented how labour statistics can and may be improved to be more gender-sensitive, and how to produce gender pay gap statistics ;
v M. Klas RYDENSTAM, highly qualified international expert in Time use surveys, presented the methodology for designing TUS, its technique, data processing and production of output.
The agenda and list of participants are provided in annexes 1 & 2.
5) Issues discussed during the meeting
The discussions at the meeting were organised according the proposed tentative timetable, and based on invited and supporting papers. All speakers argued that Gender statistics are a means to developing and strengthening the statistical system.
Ø Time use surveys (TUS): Presentations by INE-Spain on the Value of non-market labour production of Spanish households in 2003 & 2010, and by Serbia, and Moldova on their national TUS for 2010/11 were made. All speakers agreed that Time use surveys are becoming increasingly a crucial instrument for understanding how people allocate their time among different types of activities during the day and show the gendered patterns of the roles and conditions of women and men in family and social life. Finding from participating countries show that these surveys are also an important source of information for measuring household satellite accounts and improving equality between men and women. The recommendations of the UN-ECE Task Force on TUS were also shared during the meeting
Ø Revising the Gender Pay Gap (GPG): Presentations, supported by papers, were made by Austria on evidences of the GPG; by Ms. Nurit Dobrin, CBS, Israel, on Promotion of employees in the workplace: are men promoted more than women?; by Ms. Wafaa Maged Ahmed, CAPMAS, Egypt on the GPG in Egypt; by Ms. Manal Sweidan, DOS, Jordan, on Male-Female Pay Differences, the Jordanian Case; and by participants from the Russian Federation on causes of the GPG, and Switzerland on GPG and wage discrimination in the Greater Zurich Region.
The discussant from OECD (Gender Initiative Project) stated that generally women participate less than men in the labour market, women work shorter hours than men, Women work more in part-time jobs than men, asked whether there is a best way to measure GPG, asked how to deal with missing values, and whether we should give priority to computing the mean or the median as central value. We suggested that we should look into designing a life expectancy that takes into account working ages.
Future research should be encouraged towards increasing knowledge on the determinants for the GPG across the world, developing multivariate analysis to get a better understanding of the determinants of the GPG, and better understand why women are segregated in occupations/sectors with lower pay.
Ø Measuring violence against women (VAW): The collection and dissemination of statistics on the prevalence and incidence of various forms of violence against women is part of the global effort to develop appropriate policies, legislation and services for women affected by violence and to eradicate this phenomenon. This session examined recent work related to measuring VAW and provided participants the opportunity to share information on related work undertaken in their offices.
Presentations by Statistics Estonia on the module on intimate partner abuse in the 2008-2009 Security survey in Estonia, and by Moldova.
Ms. Henriette Jansen presented the UNECE survey module for measuring the UN indicators on VAW. A set of 9 core indicators were developed after the 2006 General Assembly adopted a resolution on VAW and the establishment of the Friends of the Chair in 2008, and 2007-2010 Experts Group meetings. It is important to note that VAW are to be measured through surveys and not through administrative records. The current UNECE VAW survey, which is currently a module of another survey, should be implemented as a dedicated survey. Questions are formulated in terms of “behaviour acts” and not in terms of “violence”.
Survey material, including training manuals for interviewers, PPT, codebooks and analysis plan are made available. The survey module was tested in Georgia and Moldova.
Several relevant questions were asked to the speaker by participants from Lebanon (why not using different questionnaires for man and woman?), Algeria (high illiteracy limits the rate of response in case of CAPI), Mexico (How come that some questions were not differentiated between the victim and the perpetrator?), and Israel (did you isolate the respondent? What use by policy makers? Did the respondent report to the police?), and the Key expert of Social statistics (how is violence against children tackled?).
The speaker stated that Survey Guidelines are currently drafted by UNSD, and an English e-course was delivered in Oct-Nov 2011, during 8 weeks for statisticians and women machineries – a participant from Lebanon has indeed highly benefited from this course. The e-course is being translated into other languages. More information can be found on the VAW website: http://www1.unece.org/stat/platform/display/VAW
Ø A presentation on Measuring sex, gender & gender identity was made by representative of the Equality and Human Right Commission, UK. This presentation raised a number of questions concerning the relevance of such a topic for statistics given the very small magnitude of the issue. Nevertheless, participants from the US and Portugal stated that this topic is under scrutiny in their respective countries.
Ø Gender analysis of census data is currently undertaken on the results of the 2010 round of population and housing censuses. The population census provides an opportunity for countries to strengthen gender mainstreaming across the national statistical system. This session provided participants with an opportunity to share their experiences and discuss the successes and challenges to date with a view to formulating proposals for gender analysis of key census topics. In addition to presentations from CIS countries, Finland and Montenegro, the participant from CAPMAS-Egypt made a significant presentation on gender analysis of the results of the 2006 population census in Egypt.
Ø The UNECE Statistical Division made a presentation on the gender-related changes that are relevant in the 2010 round of population censuses. The new recommendations of the Conference of European statisticians (CES) in cooperation with Eurostat (EU Census Programme) are:
§ Usual residence criteria: “12 month rule with the intention to stay”;
§ All persons who meet the residence criteria regardless of legal status are to be enumerated;
§ To include undocumented migrants, asylum seekers;
§ New definitions for “homeless”, “skip generation households”, and same-sex couples are proposed;
§ Gender related changes: de facto marital status; consensual union; same-sex partnership.
o Questions asked by participants included:
§ Participant from DOS-Jordan asked how could Mediterranean countries benefit from UNECE expertise? The speaker expressed willingness to provide technical expertise in coordination with UNSD.
§ Participant from ONS-Algeria expressed concerns that introducing difficult questions such as on the handicap may affect the quality of data collected in the census. The speaker stressed that not all proposed questions are recommended as part of the core questionnaire, some questions could be considered as non-core.
§ Participant from CBS-Israel stated that in Israel gender analysis can be performed on census data only if qualitative questions on satisfaction, expectations, etc are included.
Ø Indicators of gender equality:
o The UNECE Task Force on Indicators of Gender Equality established by the Conference of European Statisticians in 2010 presented the conceptual framework and the approach that it had taken in its work. The TF has taken the Beijing Platform of Action as a starting point for identifying domains of gender equality. It has established a hierarchy between the indicators: headline and supporting indicators. It also pays attention to the domains for which less info is available (data gap).
o Eurostat presented its indicators of gender equality, and the dedicated subsection on the website. The criteria used by Eurostat to select its indicators are: relevance, data availability (freshness, completeness), comparability; easily understood by users.
o The European Institute for Gender Equality presented its Gender Equality Index based on 8 domains and sub-domains: Work, Money (income, economic situation), Power and participation (Engagement, Decision making power), Knowledge (attainment, skills, lifelong learning), Time (Work, care, leisure), Health (status, behaviour, use), Harm (satellite indicator: direct, structural, cultural), Intersecting inequalities (discrimination grounds). The criteria for selection are similar to EU.
o Presentation by FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia on gender statistics: a Core set of gender indicators (18) for closing the gap in agriculture was designed in the Likelihood Framework (DFID), linked to the Global strategy to improve agriculture and rural statistics (WB-FAO). FAO is concerned with reducing to a minimum the burden on statisticians to extract the indicators from existing data and yet satisfying users requirements. 25 countries and Expert Groups were consulted in the design process. Experience suggests that agriculture work by women is better captured by TUS rather then by traditional farm-based household surveys. A National Gender Profile (Gender and Agriculture Statistical Framework (GASF) was designed for Turkey.