February 2008

 From  Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Gender Statistics

All the efforts discussed last week come under the umbrella of gender statistics.  Gender statistics is a relatively new area of study relating to traditional areas of statistics as well as the statistical system as a whole.  Gender statistics refer to the situation of men and women in all policy areas and facilitate a study of gender inequalities and gender issues that goes beyond statistics disaggregated by sex. It also includes gender-specific publications and gender mainstreaming. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) notes the following reasons for why we need gender statistics.

As usual on Fridays,  based on Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Gender Statistics

 Measuring gender remains a work in progress.  On the one hand, official data that capture for example, labor statistics, demographics, have been engendered by disaggregating data into male and female components.  However, there is widespread agreement among women’s organizations and feminist scholars that this falls far short of the mark.  Since the 1970s, significant progress has been made in pushing for a more accurate representation – conceptual and methodological – of women’s work in particular.  Furthermore, in recent years, there has been an effort to develop databases that capture the economic realities of gender inequality in opportunities, be that rights, resources and voice (World Bank, 2001) and/or gender-biased macroeconomic policies. The following paragraphs examine the progress that has been made in understanding and measuring women’s work, thus facilitating a more accurate measure of gender and the databases that have been developed to examine gender inequalities.

The UNDP's International Poverty Centre has announced the publication of the book The Many Dimensions of Poverty, which draws from the  International Conference on “The Many Dimensions of Poverty”, held in Brasilia in 2005.

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to poverty, including five different perspectives from the disciplines of economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and institutional economics. The book also explores the link between poverty and the concept of freedom, as articulated by Amartya Sen, in terms of capabilities that are valuable to people. There are also studies of chronicity of poverty, the concept of vulnerability, the political economy of poverty alleviation and the pro-poorness of government programs. The book presents a panorama, as large as possible, of the many facets of poverty. The broad view of poverty that the book offers is likely to orient research on poverty in directions neglected hitherto and to help those in charge of implementing poverty reduction policies.