A new UN Women survey has found high support for expanded paternity leave policies throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and for increasing fathers’ participation in childcare.

Researchers surveyed 1,154 people in governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, and Tunisia, none of which currently offer parental leave longer than 15 days. Read more>

In Kyrgyzstan, data journalism is being harnessed as a powerful tool to improve data accessibility and use—one of the main objectives of the Women Count programme.

With support from UN Women, a group of young journalists from the School of Data non-governmental organization partnered with the popular Kloop Media outlet in 2019 to produce five compelling stories based on gender statistics about critical issues, such as women’s political participation, violence against women and girls, sexual and reproductive health and rights, access to education, and barriers to women’s labour force participation. Read more>

How women and men spend their time – including how much of it they devote to paid versus unpaid work – can yield important insights for economic development. But many countries have never been able to measure this through a proper statistical survey. Until recently, this was the case for Senegal. But the findings of its first-ever time-use survey (TUS) are now galvanizing advocacy by women’s groups, prompting revisions of government policies and programmes, and enabling the value of women’s unpaid work to be estimated for the first time.

Conducted by Senegal’s National Statistical Office (ANSD) in 2021, with technical and financial support from UN Women, the findings were published and disseminated among policymakers in 2022. Among its key findings were that 90% of women devote their time to unpaid care and domestic work compared to 54% of men, while 50% of men do paid work versus just 31% of women. On average, women devote 5 hours a day to unpaid work, compared to 2 hours for men – 2.5 times more time. Read more>

Fund gender data. Use gender data. This was the parting shot from Papa Seck, Chief Statistician at UN Women during a keynote address at a recent all-Africa forum on gender data. More than 120 public policy analysts and gender data practitioners from 30 African countries had convened in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2022 for the Africa Gender Statistics Conference—the biggest gender statistics convening ever held in Africa. Delegates met to interrogate gender statistics through two lenses; Agenda 2063—the African Union’s blueprint for transforming Africa into a global powerhouse, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that support gender equality and women’s empowerment. Read more>

More than 60 international experts gathered for the first international conference discussing the standardized definition and statistical approach to measuring femicide (the gender-related killings of women and girls) in Asia and the Pacific region. Taking place in Seoul from 25–27 September online and in-person, the “International Conference on Ending Gender-Related Killings of Women and Girls” was co-organized by UN Women Centre of Excellence for Gender Equality, and the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC)-Statistics Korea (KOSTAT) Centre of Excellence for Statistics on Crime and Criminal Justice in Asia and the Pacific. Read more>

Yasmín Belén Quiroga is a feminist lawyer specializing in gender and data. She is a secretary at the Criminal and Misdemeanor Court 10 of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is one of the authors of " Data with a gender perspective and Open Justice", research conducted as part of the Spotlight Initiative on the experience of Court 10, which makes available all the resolutions and sentences of the court through digital media. She is also co-founder of DataGénero, the first gender-sensitive data observatory in Latin America. Read more>

By 2050, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty and see 236 million more face food insecurity. The climate crisis fuels increases in conflict and migration, as well as exclusionary, anti-rights political rhetoric targeting women, refugees, and other vulnerable groups.

Those dire trends—and ways to reverse them—are charted in a new report by UN Women titled “Feminist climate justice: A framework for action”. Read more>