Gender Aspects and Minority Data: An Illustrative Case of Roma Women in Southeast Europe

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Gender Aspects and Minority Data An Illustrative
Case of Roma Women in Southeast Europe
United Nations Development Programme
Nadja Dolata and Susanne Milcher, Bratislava
Regional Centre Group of Experts on gender
statistics, UNECE, Geneva, 12 September 2006
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Overview of presentation

• Gender and minorities the case for social
  inclusion and policy making
• Conceptual framework
• The Vulnerable Groups Survey, UNDP
• The case of Roma women
• Challenges to data collection
• Data collection instruments
• Recommendations

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Gender and minorities the case for social
inclusion and policy making

• The need for adequate data for policy formulation
  and monitoring.
• To identify the causal relationships related to
  social exclusion.
• Vulnerable groups exist in all societies and need
  to be included.
• But how can minorities and gender aspects be
  included in policies and monitoring without
  adequate data to map the situation of these
  sub-populations?

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Gender and minorities - Conceptual framework

• Multiple stratifiers
• Forms and ways of coping with inequality will
  always be determined by multiple stratifiers
  (ethnicity, class, disabilty, age etc.)
• Intersectionality
• BUT
• Separation of gender and ethnicity
• Where? Social movements defined it according to
  the norm
• Womens movement tendency to neglect ethnicity
• Minority movements - tendency to neglect sex

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Identity and Policy Implementation

• Separation can further risk to create
• Polarisation between ethnic and gender identity
• CHOICE
• Disempowered
• Alienated from communities
• gt Inefficient policies

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The Vulnerable Groups Survey, UNDP Europe and CIS

• Integrated household survey
• 9 countries of South East Europe
• 2 groups IDPs/Refugees and Roma
• Sample size app.1000 households per country (8
  000 total)
• Control sample of non-Roma living in close
  proximity with Roma and IDPs/Refugees
• The case of Roma women

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VGR- Case for Roma women income
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Secondary education

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Unemployment, Serbia
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Challenges to data collection

• Need of socio-economic data disaggregated by sex
  and ethnicity
• Problems related to ethnic statistics
• Legal frameworks
• Fear
• Self-identification
• Problems related to gender statistics
• Poverty measurements
• Employment
• Health and violence

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Self-identification Example of the Vulnerable
Groups survey

• The major challenge - Who is Roma? Compromise
  between self-identification and external
  identification with three levels of
  identification
• Self-identification (reflected in the census) to
  identify the distribution and size of sampling
  clusters
• External identification (local activists, Roma
  experts, social workers) to identify the specific
  location of sampling clusters
• Potential respondents implicit confirmation of
  the external identification (identifying the
  individual respondents)

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Poverty measurements

• Household as the unit of measurement (per capita)
• Assumes household as a unitary model driven by
  juste household head
• Economic income to the household does not by
  default mean an income for all household members
• Excludes intra-household distribution of
  resources
• Need to measure poverty on individual level

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Data collection instruments - Census

• Limitations
• Multiple identities of minorities
• Trust towards interviewers
• Lack of gender and ethnic sensitive questions
• Suggestions
• Multiple choice question on ethnicity
• Differentiate clearly between ethnic affiliation
  and citizenship
• Add questions on language, religion, parents
  ethnicity or country of birth
• Improve methods of fieldwork and involvement of
  minorities

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Data collection instruments HBS/LFS

• Limitations
• Fail to include representative sample of ethnic
  minorities
• With HBS/LFS drawn from the census that suffers
  from inaccurate population size data on
  minorities, under-representation of minorities in
  surveys is a direct consequence
• Suggestions
• Boosters of respective minorities or separate
  minority samples
• Inclusion of sensitive questions

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Data collection instruments - Registries

• Limitations
• Ethnicity blind but gender sensitive
• Ethnic minorities opposed to introduce ethnic
  markers for fear of discrimination
• External identification problem in health,
  education and criminal registries
• Suggestions
• Business registers could be engendered to provide
  information on entrepreneurship and agriculture
• Registries could be used for sampling surveys

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Data collection instruments - Fieldwork

• Limitations
• Simple factors turn relevant sex or ethnicity of
  the interviewer, the way a question will be
  asked, how the interviewer will be accepted by
  the respondent
• Interviews with women without presence of husband
  or other male household members
• Suggestions
• Participation and involvement of the communities
  surveyed necessary at all stages of process

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Recommendations

• Collect gender and ethnically sensitive data
  together
• Statistical institutions need to have capacity to
  provide necessary guarantees on the privacy and
  use of the data
• Legal frameworks need to balance the protection
  of privacy and the need of anonymous data
• Existing data collection systems need to be
  sensitized to issues regarding ethnicity and
  gender by
• Sufficiently disaggregating existing data
• Developing adequate indicators that capture a
  wider context
• Complementing data collected with the household
  as a unit of measurement
• Involving the ethnic community in the collection
  of data
• Modifying existing questionnaires or creating new
  ones with emphasis on gender and ethnic sensitive
  questions

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Recommendations cont.

• Cooperation and partnership between data
  producers and users
• Standards for collected data (reliability,
  consistency, usefulness)
• Develop methodologies to complement registries
  data with unanimous survey-based instruments
  complementing ethnic dimensions to the specific
  topic studied

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• Thank you for your attention!