NEWS: Gates Foundation announces $80 million commitment to close gender data gaps

THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES $80 MILLION COMMITMENT TO CLOSE GENDER DATA GAPS AND ACCELERATE PROGRESS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

New initiative will promote gender equality and support the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

SEATTLE/COPENHAGEN (May 17, 2016) – In her keynote speech today at the Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced that the foundation will commit $80 million over the next three years to close gender data gaps and help accelerate progress for women and girls around the world. Alongside the Gates Foundation’s commitment, partners across governments, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations have also agreed upon a new statement of principles regarding gender data and its importance for accelerating development outcomes.

Data holds power: It demonstrates the size and nature of social or economic problems, and brings clarity around who is falling through the cracks. Through reliable data, women and girls’ lives can become visible and counted, helping to inform programming and hold leaders to account. However, a lack of comprehensive, current information about women and girls, especially in developing countries, hinders efforts to advance gender equality. If the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are to be reached by 2030, the world must advance its knowledge about women and girls’ lives and livelihoods, their welfare and well-being, and their contributions to their communities, countries and economies.

“By adopting the SDGs the world agreed to achieve gender equality by 2030. But we cannot close the gender gap without first closing the data gap,” said Melinda Gates. “We simply don’t know enough about the barriers holding women and girls back, nor do we have sufficient information to track progress against the promises made to women and girls. We are committed to changing that by investing in better data, policies and accountability.”

Combatting inequality with information: How gender and environment data can promote gender inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals

CSW 2016 NGO Parallel Event

Please join IUCN Global Gender Office, with speakers from Conservation International, Sierra Club, and World Resources Institute in presenting new data and case studies relating to implementation, monitoring, and accountability for the SDGs.

Panelists will present new data and case studies relating to implementation, monitoring, and accountability for the Sustainable Development Goals. The event will take place on Thursday, March 24 from 12:30-2p at 221 E. 52nd Street, New York.

See the link to the event and event flyer for more information.

Making sense of land, statistics, and gender

Making sense of land, statistics, and gender (pdf) is a new infographic from the Gender and Land Rights database (GLRD) of the FAO and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). The infographic explores the correct use of land ownership statistics (ownership understood in a broad sense beyond individual property rights) and highlights how gender can influence land rights.

The infographic invites viewers to travel to a rural community in Sub-Saharan Africa to meet Tafadzwa, Wema, and Chimango who tell us about their landownership. Despite our hosts being part of the same extended family and contributing to the family farm, the data collected about them differ greatly as a result of their relationships to each other and to agricultural land.

Read on at the original posting on the FAO site.

The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics

At the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Governments adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which “seeks to promote and protect the full enjoyment of all human rights and the fundamental freedoms of all women throughout their life cycle.” Guided by these principles, the World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics presents the latest statistics and analyses of the status of women and men in areas of concern identified by the Platform for Action. It also reviews progress towards gender equality over the past 20 years. The publication is the sixth edition in a series.

The World’s Women 2015 comprises eight chapters covering critical areas of policy concern: population and families, health, education, work, power and decision-making, violence against women, environment, and poverty. In each area, a life-cycle approach is introduced to reveal the experiences of women and men during different periods of life—from childhood and the formative years, through the working and reproductive stages, to older ages.

The statistics and analyses presented in the following pages are based on a comprehensive and careful assessment of a large set of available data from international and national statistical agencies. Each chapter provides an assessment of gaps in gender statistics, highlighting progress in the availability of statistics, new and emerging methodological developments, and areas demanding further attention from the international community. In addition to the data presented in the chapters, a wide selection of statistics and indicators at the global, regional and country levels can be found in the Statistical Annex of this report.

Click here to download by chapters

Launch of new World Bank Gender Data Portal

The World Bank Group relaunched its popular Gender Data Portal, comprising current and historical data on topics ranging from health and education to jobs, assets, and political participation—all broken down by sex.

The Bank Group is also launching its Little Data Book on Gender 2016 alongside new online tables—to be updated quarterly—linked to the latest World Development Indicators, making it easier than ever to see how women and men are faring across a range of global indicators.

In addition to standard demographic and economic information, new indicators include the percentage in a given economy of businesses with female ownership or top management, percentage of men and women holding mobile phone accounts, percentage of men and women who saved any money over the preceding year, and proportion of women in ministerial-level government posts.

Continue reading the article here.

Four charts from the new portal highlight gender gaps that need to be closed: These focus on improving human endowments, through better access to health, education, and social protection; opening up more and better jobs by tackling issues such as skills gaps and care arrangements; expanding women’s access to and control over assets;  and enhancing women’s voice and agency, meaning their ability to make themselves heard and exert control over key aspects of their own lives.

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New post from EnGendering Data

How sex-disaggregated land statistics can help monitor progress of the new Sustainable Development Goals

For decades feminist economists and women’s rights advocates have made the case that the lack of data on women’s land rights has limited the ability to understand how this affects food security and rural poverty. However, recent developments may help us to overcome this challenge. The new SDGs have identified women’s land rights as a priority, setting them as targets in both Goal 1(end poverty in all its forms everywhere) and Goal 5 (achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls). Numerous UN agencies – including FAO and UN Women- are supporting the use of land indicators disaggregated by sex (in addition to type of tenure, age cohorts and ethnicity) to monitor targets regarding equal rights to economic resources, including land (t 1.4) and undertaking reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources (t 5a).

Read on at PIM’s EnGendering Data blog.

Why paying attention to gender matters for climate change adaptation

By Elizabeth Bryan, Patti Kristjanson, and Claudia Ringler

Until recently, there has been little evidence supporting the need to focus on the gendered dimensions of agriculture and climate change. Why? Because few researchers have been talking to women in agriculture as well as men–both of whom contribute to solving the food security challenges posed by climate change.

However, new research based on gender-disaggregated data sheds light on gender differences in perceptions of climate change and the ability to adopt practices and technologies needed to increase resilience. These data also show that men and women have different preferences, needs, and priorities for the ways in which they respond to climate change. These findings point to the need for integrating a gender perspective into research on climate change as well as programs and projects focused on facilitating adaptation (and mitigation) on the ground.

Read on at IFPRI.org.

Online forum on collecting, analyzing, and using sex-disaggregated and gender-sensitive data in Routine Health Information Systems (RHIS)

Register here to join the kickoff webinar for the RHINO Forum on Gender & HIS on Tuesday, July 14th, 9am-10am EST. The webinar will include a short introduction to the topic and an opportunity to meet the facilitators for the week.

Join the webinar by clicking here.

New post on EnGendering Data Blog: Debunking the myth of female labor in African agriculture

Working in the field. Ghana. Photo Credit: Curt Carnemark / World Bank

EnGendering Data, a blog on improving data on the role of gender in agriculture, has a new post on female labor in African agriculture. Cheryl Doss shares new studies that “offer our most detailed understanding to date of rural economies in Africa” and challenge the widely cited “fact” that women in Africa provide 60-80% of the labor in agriculture. She then encourages a shift of focus to the question of how to effectively invest in women’s agricultural productivity, drawing on empirical evidence to chart a course.

Read the full post on the blog, here.

New EnGendering Data blogpost: “Do you own the asset?”

The CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Markets, and Institutions (PIM) has another great post on the EnGendering Data blog.

In “Do you own the asset?”, R Padmaja and Dr. Cynthia Bantilan of ICRISAT discuss small but critical changes they made to their survey instrument to collect better data on women’s asset ownership.

Read the full post here, and join the conversation on Twitter by using #EnGenderingData!