Gender-sensitive indicators: Uses and relevance

Abstract

Objectives: Indicators are important for measuring progress, raising awareness of issues, improving the evidence base for decision-making and helping to identify which issues need priority-attention. As such, they can contribute to improved accountability and enhanced health system performance and responsiveness. Gender-sensitive health indicators, in particular, can provide a rigorous information base for policy actions that can improve health outcomes and reduce unjust health inequities resulting from the social construction of gender.Methods: Several case studies are described in the paper to illustrate the effective use of gender-sensitive indicators in making infl uential contributions to health system development and reform, and improving accountability, performance and responsiveness. Results/Conclusions: It is necessary for frameworks for health indicators to include the broad determinants of health, plus incorporate gender as a central component for analysis, so to be sensitive enough to detect gender differences in health experiences and enable consideration of equity in the analysis of health system performance. Some additional principles and strategies for the development and use of gender-sensitive health indicators include the building of effective monitoring and reporting systems which have linkages with governance, health system development and health sector reform processes, and adequate infrastructure and capacity building.Since the latter decades of the 20 th century, performance indicators have become part of the routine of public policy development and program management. While the use of data (including health indicators) has always been important for public health action, the health policy discourse, internationally, has shifted to evidence-based decision-making in more recent times. Within this broader context, women's health advocates have argued for improving data collections and making sexdisaggregated data available. Such data could then be transformed into appropriate health indicators, which in turn can lead to improvements in decision-makers' understanding of the gendered dimensions of health policy, research, programs and legislation. The working premise then is that indicators are important for measuring progress, raising awareness of issues, improving the evidence base for decision-making and helping to identify which issues need to receive immediate and future priority-attention. Indicators are, therefore, conducive to better accountability and may contribute to improving health system performance and responsiveness. Starting with such a premise, this paper aims to provide an explanation of what gender-sensitive health indicators are and how they might be used. A key issue is that while indicators have been developed to measure 'women's progress' and 'health', those which measure gender-sensitivity in health are limited. The paper is organised into the following sections: defi nitions of gender-sensitive health indicators; using gender-sensitive health indicators; successful app...

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