The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in the so-called Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
It has been well documented that gender bias in data – that is, data where men are the norm – leads to an inaccurate reflection of women’s lived experiences. In 2022, UN Women estimated that it would take 22 years to close the gender data gap to adequately assess the implementation of the SDGs and concluded that no one country had all the necessary data available. The UN Women’s Women Count initiative, which aims to support countries in defining, collecting and using gender statistics, identified the following overarching challenges which lead to the lack of gender data: a) weak policy space; b) technical and financial barriers; and c) lack of access and limited capacity of users.
This project aims to address these intra-generational challenges in several ways. First, it will help understand the gender-data reality and rhetoric of official statistics providers in the selected countries. While the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) collects and presents some country-level gender disaggregated statistics, it does not provide an overview of national resources and data availability. The project will also conduct a similar assessment of Eurostat’s resources and presented data. As statistical data collection applies a binary gender definition, the data-related focus of the project is on the differentiation between female and male categories of data. This does not represent any judgment whatsoever on a broader definition of gender, and the project does not advocate for any limitations in defining gender, but follows the statistical approach to gender-disaggregated data (GDD) according to the categories of male, female and total.
Second, the project will highlight the non-economic aspect of gender-data availability, capturing the broader wellbeing of women and girls.
Third, beyond GDD availability in and of itself, the project will help understand the policy and legal space which underpin data management. By analysing data pathways the project will propose optimisation of existing data collection patterns, demand, and management to inform policy-making on women’s wellbeing. Data pathways relate to existing institutions, processes, networks, and initiatives of data collection, curation, and use. The analysis in this project focuses on data quality, structure and governance, open access, and data sharing by policy-making bodies for the public good. This will help identify best practices and relevant data gaps, providing essential knowledge of European and country-specific practice to measure women’s wellbeing, with the aim to improve existing approaches, policies and institutions.