Special Report of the World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics - Focusing on Sex-disaggregated Statistics on Population, Births and Deaths

The Beijing Platform for Action, adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, requested producers of statistics to generate and disseminate sex-disaggregated data and information for planning and evaluation. In response to these demands, the United Nations Statistics Division is preparing a publication The World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics, to be released in September 2005. The report will analyse the current state and progress over the years of gender statistics at the national level. The current report, which presents the first results, focuses on sex and age-disaggregated statistics on population, births and deaths. Overall, there has been very little progress in the official reporting of sex-disaggregated data in the past three decades for the three topics examined in this report. On the positive side, institutional and international support of population and housing censuses has been a factor in making the conduct of censuses possible in some of the countries in the less developed regions. This is a positive picture for gender specialists, as the census provides a wealth of statistics on the situations of women and men. One finding revealed over and over in this analysis is that sex-disaggregated statistics on even the most basic topics are most lacking in those very countries that need them the most. Far more needs to be done by both producers and users of gender statistics to ensure the collection and dissemination of data needed for planning and formulating policies aimed at improving women's lives throughout the world.