Fifteen years after the Fourth World Conference on Women adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the demand for gender statistics continues to grow and remains unmet. In the 2009 Bangkok Declaration on Beijing +15, ESCAP member States drew specific attention to the need “to intensify support for statistical capacity-building efforts on the generation of gender statistics and to provide timely, reliable and disaggregated data by sex, ethnicity, age and location and the development of methodologies for the collection and processing of these gender statistics; and to ensure that gender statistics inform policy and programme decisions and effectively monitor and assess gender gains and gaps”. Many statistical systems in the region are still unable to provide the indicators for tracking progress in achieving gender equality, women’s political and economic empowerment and eliminating violence against women.

The Consultative Meeting to Develop a Regional Programme on Gender Statistics in Asia and the Pacific, organized by the Statistics Division of ESCAP, will bring together representatives from national statistical offices and national women’s machineries to take stock of existing gender statistics programmes and activities in countries in the region, substantive areas in which there exists a special lack of gender-related data at the national level, and national priorities in the area of gender statistics in the context of country development plans as well as the needs for statistics expressed in the 2009 Bangkok Declaration on Beijing +15, MDGs and other international development goals.

For this stock-taking exercise, national statistical offices that will be participating in the above mentioned consultative meeting have been requested to provide information through a Survey of National Gender Statistics Programmes and Activities in the Asia-Pacific Region, ESCAP 2010. This 2010 ESCAP Survey and the consultative meeting will serve as initial steps to gather inputs to inform the development of a Regional Programme on Gender Statistics in Asia and the Pacific.

Agenda item 2.1: ESCAP leads a review of the statistics-related priorities expressed in: the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, 2009 Bangkok Declaration on Beijing +15, MDG progress reports, and the report of the Workshop on Strengthening National Capacities to Collect Violence against Women Statistics in the Asia-Pacific Region (September 2010)

Agenda item 2.1: 2010 ESCAP Survey of National Gender Statistics Programmes and Activities in the Asia-Pacific Region

Agenda item 2.2: Overview of web-based research on gender statistics in the ESCAP Region

Agenda item 2.3: State of Gender Statistics in 2008: Results for the Asia-Pacific Region of the 2008 UNSD Survey of National Gender Statistics Programmes and Activities