Bridging the gender data gap: challenges and opportunities
Why is gender data important, and what is IIED doing to enable data to produce better, more informed decision making? This page charts our work so far and our emerging research priorities.
Over 70 Indigenous Batak men and women from nine different communities gather to protest against deforestation (Photo: Rainforest Action Network, via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Gender remains overlooked in climate and environmental policies, and vice versa, despite crises disproportionately affecting women, girls and gender-diverse people due to existing gender norms and power structures.
In sub-Saharan Africa for example, drought forces women to walk longer distances for water, increasing their risk of harassment – yet policies rarely address these dangers.
Deforestation and mining has led to increased gender-based violence against Indigenous women defending their lands - but not enough gender-disaggregated data is available to assess the scale of such incidents.
Why is gender data important?
Data that captures information on the different lived experiences of women, men and gender-diverse people is also known as gender data. This is vital for better and more informed decision-making.
Gender data includes data that is disaggregated by sex or gender; data that pertains to women, girls and gender-diverse people exclusively or primarily; and data that reflects gender issues, including roles, relations and inequalities. It can be both quantitative and qualitative; and collection methods account for stereotypes, social norms and other factors that may introduce gender biases.
However, effective action at local and national levels is often limited by siloed approaches, fragmented data and the exclusion of traditionally marginalised groups - such as Indigenous Peoples, women’s organisations and grassroots social movements.
IIED and partners are working to advance gender-just climate and environmental action by advocating for the use of accessible, intersectional data in decision-making spaces.
And a ‘whole-of-society’ approach that values diverse data contributions from non-state actors, particularly traditionally marginalised groups, is therefore essential to advance gender, climate and biodiversity goals.
Walking the walk on data transparency
After half a century working on sustainable development, IIED has a wealth of research including gender data. All this has recently been brought together in a Gender Environment Hub that also profiles other key global gender databases.
For example, IIED research has shown that just 2.3% of climate finance is primarily designed to improve gender equality, and only 57% of official development assistance targeting climate change integrates gender equality.
Yet our ability to track climate finance is hindered by a lack of disaggregated data and limited use of gendered indicators, which in turn limits our understanding on the gendered impacts of different financial mechanisms (such as loans, grants, equity finance).
This research argues that better gender data is key to tracking climate finance that supports gender equality to understand what is working, what isn’t, and reflect this back into the quality and quantity of the financial flows.
Emerging research priorities
As we interrogate IIED’s work, initially focusing on the last decade, some key themes are emerging as priorities to explore in the context of addressing data gaps in the gender-climate-environment nexus.
These include the intersections between environmental degradation and the care economy, women and girls’ health, and gender-based violence.
Insights from women’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic describe how women experienced growing care burdens, domestic violence and a lack of maternity health care facilities. And yet, “there is much we still do not know do not know on COVID-19’s impacts due to the lack of disaggregated data on age, sex, race/ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomic factors”.
Putting data at the forefront
IIED is working to bridge data gaps, elevate the contributions of non-state actors, and advocate for data-driven gender-climate-environment policy and action at national, subnational and international levels.
We co-organised an NGO parallel event and official side event at the 69th Commission on the Status of Women and our team has been similarly active following the discussions and decisions at the climate and biodiversity COPs, including a report (PDF) that highlighted the ways formal decision-making spaces weren't using gender-responsive biodiversity data provided by women-led and community-based organisations when setting policies.
Working with local actors, we will promote Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ data sovereignty and strengthen intersectional, gender-disaggregated evidence for informed, cross-sector decision-making.
One key priority in our approach is advocating for gender data and knowledge that embraces intersectional identities to understand peoples’ differential experience of environmental degradation.
IIED’s research underlines how gender identity and expression are often ignored in international development practice and policy. This can lead to those with differing SOGIESC (real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and/or sex characteristics) experiencing discrimination and exclusion from assistance during a disaster.
