Guide on Gender Analysis of Census Data Full Draft of 6 December 2012 Contents
Table 39: El Salvador (2007) - School attendance of 6-14 year olds by sex and type of disability
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- Table 40: El Salvador (2007) - Percentage of ever married 30-39 year olds by sex and type of disability
- Table 41: Ireland (2007) - Voluntary care given by sex and marital status of the caregiver and the number of hours of care given per week
- Table 42: Liberia (2008) – Causes of disability by sex
- 5. Indicators
- Methodology Box 9: Age Standardization
Table 39: El Salvador (2007) - School attendance of 6-14 year olds by sex and type of disability
Source: Computed from the On-line REDATAM Data Base of the 2007 Population and Housing Census of El Salvador 537. The table shows that having a disability significantly reduces children’s chances to attend formal education, particularly in the case of mental problems, speech impairment or difficulty in carrying out everyday tasks such as bathing, clothing and eating. Sight impairment is the least serious disability, from the viewpoint of school attendance. The differences between boys and girls are small, with school attendance in most categories slightly higher for girls. This may not be typical of the situation in other parts of the world. The WHO World Report on Disability (2011) (Table 7.1) lists school completion figures for a weighted sample of 51 countries, based on survey data, which suggest that disability reduces a boy’s chances of school completion from 61.3 to 50.6 per cent (i.e. a factor of 0.825) and a girl’s chances from 52.9 to 41.7 per cent (i.e. a factor 0.788). However, as always it is crucial that these data be analysed by age group, not only because male and female age structures may be different, but also because things may have changed and the situation of younger cohorts may be quite different from older cohorts. The report of the 2007 census of Swaziland (Volume 4), for example, lists 617 girls with disabilities between the ages of 10 and 19 that had never attended formal education, compared to 665 boys, suggesting a slightly more favourable situation for girls. But among men and women with disabilities between the ages of 40 and 49 the overall number and the gender balance were quite different, with 2789 women and 1484 men that had never attended formal education. Table 40: El Salvador (2007) - Percentage of ever married 30-39 year olds by sex and type of disability
Source: Computed from the On-line REDATAM Data Base of the 2007 Population and Housing Census of El Salvador 538. Table 40, obtained from the same source, compares the probabilities of men and women with disabilities ever having been married by the time they are in their thirties. The picture here is somewhat mixed. Although some types of disability affect the marriage chances of women more than those of men, such as difficulties in walking or in the use of hands or arms, women with hearing or speech impairments or with mental retardation or deficiency or those who have difficulty in performing everyday activities actually have a better chance of marrying than men with these disabilities. 539. Census data on voluntary caring for persons with disabilities are hard to get by because only a handful of censuses ask these questions. The 2007 census of Ireland, which did address this issue, yielded the following table for men and women by marital status. Table 41: Ireland (2007) - Voluntary care given by sex and marital status of the caregiver and the number of hours of care given per week
Source: Population and Housing Census of Ireland (2007), Report 11 540. Some countries publish more detailed tabulations, based on more detailed census information, beyond the standard questions. The census report of Liberia (2008), for example, contains a table on the cause of disability, with the following categories: Table 42: Liberia (2008) – Causes of disability by sex Males Females From birth 4,708 4,174 Polio 2,288 1,878 Stroke 1,162 982 Epilepsy 1,195 1,125 War 7,634 6,131 Occupational injury 2,633 1,407 Transportation accident 1,731 923 Other types of accident 4,116 2,303 Ageing process 4,224 5,675 Other causes 11,147 12,476 Other diseases 15,824 16,624
542. Investigating a specific topic or factor, such as education, may serve as a useful indicator of disability and gender issues. For instance, Possi’s (1996) study of Tanzania indicates that while the gender parity in education is not an issue at the primary school level, the number of enrolled girls with disabilities decreases as the number of years in secondary school increases, similarly to the pattern for non-disabled girls in primary and secondary schools in Tanzania. Further, very few women with disabilities have a college or university education. (This analysis is relatively meaningless if it doesn’t make a comparison with the statistics for boys). 5. Indicators 543. Using data from subsequent censuses can provide another gendered measure of disability status. Using census data from Ireland, it was found that there were more males than females living with a disability in 2000 (among the disabled population enumerated in the 2000 census, 20,576 were males and 20,214 were females; the sex-ratio was 101.8). Nevertheless, although the sex ratios indicated more males than females among the disabled population (both in 1990 and 2000), the decline in the sex ratio in 2000 denoted that the female disabled population has been growing at a faster rate than the corresponding male population. In order to correctly interpret this trend, however, one would need to separate the components of this increase that are due to the actual increase of the age-specific prevalence of disabilities from the age effect, which is due to the fact that the female population is ageing faster than the male population. A solution to this type of problem is by using age standardization (see the Methodology Box below). Methodology Box 9: Age Standardization The 2011 census of Montenegro found that 54 per cent of the people in the country living with a disability were women and 46 per cent were men (UNECE, 2012 b). If the objective of computing this statistic is to know whether the care for persons with disabilities should be organized predominantly to attend to female or to male patients, it is an appropriate indicator. However, if the objective is to establish whether women are more or less prone to suffer from disabilities than men, it is flawed by two intervening factors, namely: 1. There are more women than men in the population; and 2. The excess of women over men is concentrated in the oldest ages, where disabilities are most common. To take care of the first problem, one may compute a different statistic, namely the percent-age of men and women that suffer from disabilities. Unlike the previous indicator, this one is not affected by the total number of men and women. The result is 11.7 per cent for women, compared to 10.2 per cent for men, which still suggests a higher incidence of disabilities among women. However, when one age-standardizes this difference, i.e. when one computes the percentages by age and then applies them to the same age distribution (in this case, the age distribution for both sexes combined), the difference disappears and both percentages become 11.0 per cent. The incidence of disabilities in men is higher early in life, whereas for women it is higher at older ages, but given the age distribution for both sexes combined, the overall incidence is about the same. The following example from the 2010 census of Mexico illustrates how to carry out the various steps to standardize the age structure.
Source: INEGI, Tabulations from the 2010 census The percentage of persons with disabilities who are women is 2,268,626 / (2,256,885 + 2,268,626) = 50.1 per cent. The percentage of persons who have a disability is 100 * 2,268,626 / 56,784,120 = 4.00 per cent for women, compared to 100 * 2,256,885 / 54,155,012 = 4.17 per cent for men. The age standardization consists in applying the percentage of persons with a disability, separated by sex, not to the corresponding male or female population, but to a common population, in this case made up of all individuals, of both sexes. This yields the hypothetical results displayed in the last two columns, which vary between the sexes because of the different proportions of disabilities among men and women, but not because of the different numbers of men in the base population. The age standardized percentage of women with disabilities is now 100 * 4,297,736 / (54,155,012 + 56,784,120) = 3.87 per cent, compared to 100 * 4,297,736 / (54,155,012 + 56,784,120) = 4.29 per cent for men. Again, the male rates tend to be higher until age 60, whereas the female rates are higher at older ages. 544. In the case of Nicaragua, where the overall percentage of persons with disabilities is 9.1 for men and 11.3 for women (Mont, 2007), male disability rates are higher than female rates until adulthood; men and women are similar until age 39; after that, the rates diverge to a 10 percentage point differential in favour of men. This suggests that there is something about events during the life course that differentiate the experiences of women and men in how and when they acquire disabilities. The research by Stubbs and Tawake (2009) in Somoa showcased just above might suggest that this mid-life higher propensity to develop a disability for women could be associated with child birth or lower income. In order to understand the Nicaraguan case better, the researcher may tabulate having a disability by sex, age group, and poverty status. 545. The following table provides unstandardized and standardized indicators from the 2010 census of Mexico, separated by type of disability. Download 4.06 Mb. Share with your friends:
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