Beth Woroniuk
Gender Equality Specialist
Ms Woroniuk, what is gender analysis and why does it matter? And why is it necessary to include gender perspectives in community development strategic plans?
When we are talking about a gender equality approach, we are looking at different perspectives: access to resources, roles, needs and priorities for women and men, boys and girls. We’re trying to understand how they are different and how they are the same for diverse groups. How a 17-year-old mom has very different needs, perspectives and priorities than a 50-year-old man with grandchildren. So, in the current economic situation, different groups and people have different needs. Also given many different inequalities between women and men, they face different obstacles when trying to find work or making sure they have enough resources to provide for their family. So, gender equality analysis is about understanding all those differences and inequalities.
And why it matters? It matters for a whole bunch of reasons. Investing in women and girls is good for economies. Around the world, economies with smaller gaps between men and women perform better. We also know that it is good for businesses. If a business draws on the diversity of men and women, it tends to have better results. It has better profits, it is stronger. It is able to withstand a crisis better. There are very strong economic arguments. We can make a business case for narrowing inequalities between women and men. But there are also other reasons, such as human rights commitments. We have commitments in Canada. There are commitments in Ukraine. Women and girls have a right to be equal with men and boys.
Gender analysis should be incorporated into the regular analysis. Understanding all of these gender differences and gender inequalities should be part of the general analysis. It just involves making one more step and making sure that you understand that people are not all the same, that populations are very diverse. So, a strategic plan without a gender analysis just says so many people are unemployed, or that so many households lacked access to resources, or this many people that left the city. A gender analysis pushes the analysis one step further and says that is very important for us to know who the unemployed are (for example, 60% men and 40% women) and how our strategies will be different to meet the needs of all of these people. So it involves digging a little deeper, asking different kinds of questions about the data. It should not be something you do afterwards. It is another technique within the analysis to understand the situation better, because meeting the needs or resolving the situation of different groups of people are going to need different strategies. And we have to have that analysis to help us understand what the implications are for planning or city priorities.
At the training seminar, you were talking about sex-disaggregated statistics and gender–responsive budgets. Could you explain us those notions in more detail?
Sex-disaggregated statistics involve looking at a general number and asking how many were women, how many were men, how many were boys or how many were girls. We can say: so many children participated in an afterschool program, but sex disaggregate that number involves breaking that down. For example, if there were 500 students participating, out of those 300 were boys and 200 were girls. So, sex-disaggregated statistics means breaking it down a general number into the percentage male and female.
Gender–responsive budgets try to ‘follow the money.’ It is a methodology that is being used around the world. Governments spend money and allocate resources. Are those resources being allocated to meet the needs of women and men, or is somebody being left out when governments spend? Who benefits? So it is asking the big question if we look at the overall government resources, how does the government choose to spend money, what are its priorities, do those match with the priorities of the whole population? Who is benefiting from government services, who is participating in government programs, and what happens when government allocates or reallocates, how they spend their money? For example, if we do an analysis of pension programs, we understand who receives a pension and what happens when you cut that pension. Or you increase the age of eligibility for a pension. In Ukraine there are many more women who have pensions than men. So if you squeeze the amount of money that pensioners receive that is hurting more women than it is hurting men. Gender-responsive budgets help demonstrate if a policy is having a differential impact on women and men and hopefully when you have the evidence, decision makers can take measures to make things more equal.