| dc.description.abstract | A national Population and Housing Census has the enormous
advantage of enumerating every single household
and individual in a country, thereby making it possible to
provide more robust and disaggregated detail on particular
geographic areas and social groups than almost any
other data source.
One of the main pillars of UNFPA’s technical support for
national Population and Housing Censuses is to make certain
that the best possible use is made of the information
collected to inform policy and programming; particularly
in areas such as sexual and reproductive health and rights,
adolescents and youth, population dynamics and gender.
In the case of gender, many National Statistical Offices
(NSOs) have sought UNFPA’s support in the analysis
and production of special gender monographs based on
their census data. While developing these monographs,
social scientists have often been confronted with two
challenges. One is that the statistical analysis of gender
issues (using any data source), is often limited to an
over-simplified analysis of indicators that document differences
by sex. While this is a necessary step in a more
comprehensive gender analysis, it is by no means sufficient.
True gender analysis needs to assess, analyze and
reveal the processes of differential social roles, variance in social treatment and outright discrimination that explain
the observed results.
The second challenge is that census data only address a
limited number of concerns that are of interest to gender
analysis. Issues such as division of household tasks, access
to services, fertility preferences or domestic violence are
generally beyond the scope of what can be asked for in a
census.
The Needs Assessment Conferences for Census Analysis
(NACCA), which the Population and Development
Branch of UNFPA’s Technical Division organized
between 2009 and 2011 in Dakar, Senegal, Punta Cana,
Dominican Republic and Bali, Indonesia, identified the
need for a better orientation of NSOs in the production
of census gender monographs. More specifically, suggestions
were made to take better advantage of the unique
opportunities offered by the census and – to the extent
possible – overcome the limitations described above. In
the process of identifying best practices and proposing
novel approaches to the best use of census data for this
purpose, UNFPA collaborated up with UN Women, the
UN Statistics Division and UNICEF. This manual is
the result of three years of work which benefited from the input of a large number of consultants and readers.
It complements the more general manual on gender statistics
recently launched by the UN Statistics Division
(United Nations, 2013), reviews a variety of data sources,
and the manual recently published by the Asia and Pacific
Regional Office (UNFPA, 2013), which covers all aspects
of the census process in the specific context of Southern
Asia.
It is anticipated that the methodological guidance provided
in this manual will offer National Statistical Offices
and those concerned with gender issues to make increasingly
effective use of the data from Population and
Housing Censuses. More importantly, based on sound
systematic analysis, we hope that national authorities are
in a better position to celebrate success where it has been
measurably achieved, and squarely address inequality and
discrimination wherever it remains. | en_US |
