When it comes to understanding and fostering women’s economic empowerment, measuring the gender dimension of trade has emerged as an increasingly important endeavour.

But for a long time, the lack of data on gender equality in international trade has posed a bottleneck, hampering countries’ abilities to apply the gender lens needed to design policies that equally empower women and men.

To bridge this gap, UNCTAD in 2018 began developing a framework to help countries link existing national statistical data to assess gender in trade. The process, called “microdata linking”, offers a cost-effective and sustainable alternative to creating new one-off surveys.

Pilots lay bare persisting gender gap in trade

The guidelines were developed as part of a joint project on data and statistics for more gender-responsive trade policies in Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, in which UNCTAD collaborated with the UN’s regional economic commissions for Africa and Europe.

Cameroon, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Senegal and Zimbabwe piloted UNCTAD’s microdata linking methodology and compiled a set of new experimental, sex-disaggregated indicators measuring employment, wages and business ownership.

The results in all six pilot countries reaffirmed gender gaps in favor of men but also revealed many differences across countries.

Georgia and Kenya presented their findings and lessons learned on 30 August at a session of the 9th UN Global Forum on Gender Statistics.

Source: https://unctad.org/news/improving-statistics-gender-and-trade-developing-countries