Gender Equality? Approaches and Quantitative Evidence Sources For Understanding the Circumstances of Men and Women in the UK

To ensure equality in relation to gender such as, for example, access to healthcare, housing, criminal justice, training, employment, pay, and paternity/maternity leave quantitative evidence is essential. Such evidence has to capture the impact of policy interventions and to identify what leads to positive change in people’s lives. Data resources available for the analysis of gender-based discrimination have developed considerably in the UK in recent years. We conducted a review of the available survey data on behalf of the Task Force for the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. Our review showed specific strengths of the available data. We found ‘gender’ to be the best-documented of all the diverse aspects of the ‘equalities’ agenda though even this policy area was not without crucial evidence gaps and weaknesses. The main sections of this paper include: a rationale for using a social-exclusion approach rather than merely an ‘employability’ approach to gendered social exclusion and a review of available statistics and the identification of evidence gaps. It is clear that a lack of robust evidence and effective survey research methodologies pose major barriers to driving forward an agenda of social justice in relation to gender equality.