The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress

We examine six studies which use social indicators to assess women?s status and progress. We then identify the underlying social and economic goals assumed to be relevant to women and analyse the suitability of current social indicators for measuring progress toward these goals. We find that althoug...

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Main Authors: Austen, Siobhan, Jefferson, Therese, Preston, Alison
Format: Working Paper
Published: Curtin University of Technology 2000
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/45978
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author Austen, Siobhan
Jefferson, Therese
Preston, Alison
author_facet Austen, Siobhan
Jefferson, Therese
Preston, Alison
author_sort Austen, Siobhan
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description We examine six studies which use social indicators to assess women?s status and progress. We then identify the underlying social and economic goals assumed to be relevant to women and analyse the suitability of current social indicators for measuring progress toward these goals. We find that although each of the six studies uses a variety of meaningful indicators, it is relatively easy to identify significant areas of women?s experiences that remain neglected. We suggest that these ?blind spots? may result from two possible and related sources. The first relates to the method in which definitions of women?s progress are constructed. The second reflects poor or limited data collection in some significant areas of relevance to women?s social and economic status.
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institution Curtin University Malaysia
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publishDate 2000
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spelling curtin-20.500.11937-459782017-01-30T15:24:31Z The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress Austen, Siobhan Jefferson, Therese Preston, Alison We examine six studies which use social indicators to assess women?s status and progress. We then identify the underlying social and economic goals assumed to be relevant to women and analyse the suitability of current social indicators for measuring progress toward these goals. We find that although each of the six studies uses a variety of meaningful indicators, it is relatively easy to identify significant areas of women?s experiences that remain neglected. We suggest that these ?blind spots? may result from two possible and related sources. The first relates to the method in which definitions of women?s progress are constructed. The second reflects poor or limited data collection in some significant areas of relevance to women?s social and economic status. 2000 Working Paper http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/45978 Curtin University of Technology fulltext
spellingShingle Austen, Siobhan
Jefferson, Therese
Preston, Alison
The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
title The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
title_full The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
title_fullStr The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
title_full_unstemmed The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
title_short The challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
title_sort challenges of defining and measuring women's social and economic progress
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/45978