By Dorothy Otieno
From the article:
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will not be achieved without closing the gender data gap, said experts at the second UN World Data Forum.
When businesses, governments and other players are armed with data, they are able to improve the everyday decisions they make, yet for women and girls, basic information about their lives is lacking. As a result, their needs are not being prioritised and their contributions are undervalued, according to gender and data experts at the forum held in Dubai. “There is no equality of information on women and girls that is governing policy. Data in all aspects of girls’ and women’s lives is missing or is biased,” says Emily Courey Pryor, executive director of Data2X, an alliance dedicated to improving the quality and use of gender data that is housed at the United Nations Foundation.
An audit by UN Women shows that about a fifth or 53 out of 241 SDGs indicators explicitly refer to sex, gender, women and girls or are largely targeted at women and girls. A less restrictive criterion, where all indicators that are relevant for women and girls and can be disaggregated by sex are included, would yield a greater number of indicators.
But a third of the indicators proposed to track progress on gender issues cannot be generated globally because international standards measuring them do not exist and most countries do not conduct regular surveys on them, says Mayra Buvinic, a senior fellow at Data2X and Centre for Global Development.
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