This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2024. 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 Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The FEMETRICS project aims to address gender data gaps by assessing official statistics providers, highlighting the non-economic aspect of gender-data availability, capturing the broader wellbeing of women and girls, and analysing policy and legal frameworks.
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. Statistical data collection most commonly applies a disaggregation by biological sex (i.e., a binary definition of sex). However, gender-disaggregated data (i.e., reflecting social identities) play an important role in framing social policies. Contributions can focus either on sex-disaggregated or on gender-disaggregated data and/or apply a comparative perspective to both types of data to allow for a broad perspective on the subject area. The project does not apply any type of judgement whatsoever on a broader definition of gender, and it does not advocate for any limitations in defining gender. Rather, it acknowledges that GDD provide deeper insights into a broad range of social and gender-related realities.
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.
The project team works in close cooperation with the Knowledge, Governance, Transformations Research Area of the Global Governance Programme at the EUI's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
FEMETRICS research project foresees the organisation of two online seminars and one final conference. The conference is taking place on 11-12 November 2024, for which the call for contributions is open until 15 August 2024.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.