Gender Data

Understanding impacts and gauging results

Two women in full PPE walking in the street with a clipboard.
Development workers look at their checklist during an awareness raising drive in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Sex-disaggregated and other gender data is crucial for identifying the needs of at-risk communities and targeting them with interventions like this one. Photo: UN Women/Fahad Abdullah Kaizer.

A lack of sex-disaggregated and broader gender data on the impacts of the pandemic has made it difficult to gauge and respond to the specific needs of women and girls. This has contributed to the failure of many COVID-19 response and recovery plans to incorporate gender-sensitive policies. 

Gender Data

What can governments do?

  • Increase support to National Statistics Systems to facilitate the strengthening of gender data collection.
  • Disaggregate all COVID data by sex (and ideally by other key sociodemographic characteristics as well).
  • Invest in the collection and analysis of gender data to better understand and respond to the pandemic’s gendered impacts, as well as to monitor the gendered impacts of COVID-19 relief efforts.
  • Expand the availability of COVID related gender data.

What is UN Women doing?

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