GEM

There are substantial gender data gaps in government thinking, and the result is that governments produce male-biased policy that is harming women. These data gaps are in part a result of failing to collect data, but they are also in part a result of the male dominance of governments around the world. And while we may not think of male-dominated government as a gender data gap problem, the evidence makes it clear that female perspective matters.

Caroline Criado Perez

Making every woman and girl count will require a revolution not only in gender data but also in policies, programming and accountability.

UN Women

[Sex-disaggregated data] provides civil society organizations with tools to evaluate government policies and hold states to account.

Lorena Fuentes & Tara Patricia Cookson

Tracking progress on gender equality through data

Governments of the Lower Mekong countries affirm their commitment to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment through an adoption of the SDG agenda. To monitor the progress, accessing gender statistics is critical. However, in the Lower Mekong Region, gender statistics such as Gender Inequality Index (GII) are only available at the national level, primarily to serve the purpose of reporting to international community. Sex disaggregated data at sub-national levels are not always publicly accessible. This makes it difficult to track the performance of promoting gender equality within a country.

The Gender Equality Monitoring (GEM) platform offers open access to officially published data and periodically updated sex disaggregated data repository. It visualizes gender gaps at subnational level in various sectors such as education, health, employment, access to information, intra-household decisionmaking, political participation, as well as gender inequality index (GII). These are starting points to further explore the causes and more complex dynamics of gender inequality.

Data in the GEM Platform can be used for free by gender advocates, policymakers, researchers and development practitioners to:

Identify gender data gaps in sectors at sub-national level
Establish baseline data for tracking gender inequality
Understand subnational level dynamics that contribute to gender inequality
Increase interministerial cooperation on data collection, data sharing, gender analysis and gender-responsive planning

Exploring The Data

This GEM platform offers two key functions:

It visualizes gender inequality at sub-national level, including gender inequality index (GII) and gender gaps in various sectors, using periodically updated and official gender disaggregated data.
It offers sectoral gender data repository for public use.

Gender Inequality Index

The Gender Inequality Index (GII) is developed by UN to measure inequality between women and men in three dimensions of human development i.e. reproductive health, labor market and empowerment across countries.

The index ranges from 0 (for gender equality) to 1 (gender inequality). The GEM platform offers a unique feature: the GII at sub-national level. Thanks to this feature, the GII can be used not only for reporting to international community, but also for tracking gender gaps at sub-national level – an important supporting tool for gender-responsive planning.

Some datasets for calculating the GII at sub-national level have been replaced by equivalent data, depending on the availability of data in the countries.

Sectoral Gender Gaps

Gender inequality is more than a fixed number. It is multi-dimensional and subtle, reflecting diverse forms of inequality experienced by women and men in different spaces.

This ‘Sectoral Gender Gaps’ show the disparity between women and men in various aspects of human wellbeing e.g. access to school, educational achievement, access to general and reproductive healthcare, HIV treatments, participation in labor market and employment status, intra-household decision making and political participation… through sex-disaggregated data. In some countries, it shows the difference in their perceptions on gender-based violence. It also offers a glimpse of intersectional inequality when factor in other social status such as migrant, rural and urban.

This enables the identification of sector, sub-sector and location where inequalities exist, which is crucial for initiating further actions to address the inequalities.

Making every woman and girl count will require a revolution not only in gender data but also in policies, programming and accountability. UN Women

[Sex-disaggregated data] provides civil society organizations with tools to evaluate government policies and hold states to account. Lorena Fuentes & Tara Patricia Cookson

Making every woman and girl count will require a revolution not only in gender data but also in policies, programming and accountability. UN Women

[Sex-disaggregated data] provides civil society organizations with tools to evaluate government policies and hold states to account. Lorena Fuentes & Tara Patricia Cookson

Tracking progress on gender equality through data

Exploring The Data

Gender Inequality Index

Sectoral Gender Gaps

OUR PARTNERS

Making every woman and girl count will require a revolution not only in gender data but also in policies, programming and accountability.

UN Women

[Sex-disaggregated data] provides civil society organizations with tools to evaluate government policies and hold states to account.

Lorena Fuentes & Tara Patricia Cookson

Making every woman and girl count will require a revolution not only in gender data but also in policies, programming and accountability.

UN Women

[Sex-disaggregated data] provides civil society organizations with tools to evaluate government policies and hold states to account.

Lorena Fuentes & Tara Patricia Cookson