Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

124 Chapter 10
Box 10.1
Proposed
indicators for
tracking progress
toward strategic
priorities for
Goal 3
Education
• The ratio of female to male gross enrollment rates in primary, secondary, and tertiary
education.
• The ratio of female to male completion rates in primary, secondary, and tertiary
education.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights
• Proportion of contraceptive demand satisfied.
• Adolescent fertility rate.
Infrastructure
• Hours per day (or year) women and men spend fetching water and collecting fuel.
Property rights
• Land ownership by male, female, or jointly held.
• Housing title, disaggregated by male, female, or jointly held.
Employment
• Share of women in employment, both wage and self-employment, by type.
• Gender gaps in earnings in wage and self-employment.
Participation in national parliaments and local government bodies
• Percentage of seats held by women in national parliament.
• Percentage of seats held by women in local government bodies.
Violence against women
• Prevalence of domestic violence.
female enrollment rates to gross or net male enrollment rates in primary, secondary,
and tertiary education. 4 Sex-specific enrollment rates give the number
of girls and boys enrolled in a given level of education relative to the population
of the age group that should be enrolled at that level. This ratio of the sexspecific
enrollment rates permits tracking whether shrinking gender gaps are
being achieved through increases in girls’ enrollment rates or through decreases
in boys’ enrollment rates.
The second recommended change is to replace the literacy ratio with the ratio
of girls’ to boys’ completion rates at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.
The completion rate captures the total number of students successfully completing,
or graduating from, the last year of a given education cycle in a given year,
expressed as a proportion of the total number of children of graduation age in the
population (UNESCO 2004). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank’s Human Development
Network have data on sex-disaggregated completion rates in primary school. 5
However, secondary completion rates are not being tracked or reported regularly
by countries, so there are no comprehensive cross-country data for this indicator.
The data that are available for secondary completion rates come primarily
from developed countries and a few middle-income developing countries. 6 The
task force recommends the collection of data on secondary school completion in
developing countries, using UNESCO’s International Standard Classification of
Education 1997 (ISCED–97) for education cycles.