Conversation with Dan Seymour, UN Women
A conversation with Dan Seymour, Director of Strategic Partnerships, UN Women and Grace Lown, Head of Public Affairs, Kantar Public
The United Nations General Assembly created UN Women in July 2010 to address the challenges faced in the promotion of gender equality globally. Dan Seymour serves as UN Women Director of Strategic Partnerships, leading on multi-stakeholder partnerships to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 5: achieving gender equality.
One of these key initiatives - which Kantar is proud to support - is the Unstereotype Alliance, an industry-led group convened by UN Women to unite industry leaders, decision-makers and creatives to end harmful gender stereotypes in advertising.
In this conversation with Grace Lown from Kantar Public, Dan Seymour shares his perspective on the power of evidence in designing effective gender policy, the imperative to apply a gender lens to the data we have, and the powerful potential for development through investing in women and girls.
Grace: UN Women is the global champion for gender equality, working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live up to her full potential.
Drawing on your experience, could you talk about the role of evidence and data in designing policy for gender equality?
Dan: The first question to ask when thinking about this is - what are the specificities and the relevance of data to the pursuit of gender equality versus the pursuit of anything else? In our sphere, there are three areas where we depend most heavily on data.
One is for the purposes of advocacy and mobilisation. The challenges of gender equality are predominantly political, rather than technical. What I mean by this is, there is no technical challenge to paying women the same as men for the same work: you either decide to do it or you don’t. There is no technical challenge to having equality in terms of the number of men or women in Parliament: it’s to do with nominating and voting for them.
So, in advocacy and mobilisation, data has importance in terms of getting people to understand not only the extent of the gaps we’re trying to close or the challenges we're trying to address, but the impact of those gaps.
For example, the untapped economic potential, the ‘dollars left on the table’ due to the exclusion of women from the workforce.
The second way we use that data is to inform policy choices. Data helps us understand the drivers of equality and inequality.
It allows us to build more effective responses, and to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of those interventions that we undertake.
Thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, we use data as an essential accountability lever. So much of gender equality is about achieving the implementation of things that have been promised.
In 1979, the vast majority of countries signed and ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Discrimination Against Women. Every country in the world is committed to the Beijing Platform for Action from 1995. And then in 2015, world leaders aligned themselves behind the Sustainable Development Goals – with the SDG5 being about achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.
We have no shortage of reference points and standards on gender equality, the issue is action.
The availability of evidence and data to show whether governments are living up to their commitments, is an essential accountability lever.
It’s important to note that there are also some specific issues related to gender in this question of evidence and the role it can play. One is that people’s attitudes and beliefs in relation to gender can be spectacularly stubborn. It is hard to shift beliefs about the innate nature of men and women, of masculinity and femininity, that we have grown up with, and been socialised in.
Challenging those attitudes and changing those views is hard. Sometimes evidence and data about gender equality are not enough, but they are the best tools we have.
Alongside this stubbornness of beliefs, there’s also a situation where people disengage slightly as they believe they understand the issue of gender inequality, without fully appreciating the depth and scale of the challenges.
Presenting people with data, for example, on the economic costs of inequality, or the prevalence of violence against women, or the paucity of women's voices in leadership around the world: this drives home the breadth of the challenge.
Grace: Do you think the world needs more measures, more tools, more ways to compare how countries or communities are working towards achieving gender equality? Or do you think there needs to be more accountability in the tools and the evidence that already exist?
Dan: To answer this, let’s focus on three areas of gender equality: violence against women, economic opportunity, and the political space and share of voice. With regards to violence against women, it's true that the data and the tools we have to address the issue are limited. For example, we don't have conclusive statistics on prevalence. We don’t have a full picture of the attitudinal drivers of violence and so on.
On women’s economic empowerment, while we have some relatively sound figures on labour force participation, there are still other aspects which we need to know more about. And overall, the quantity of data is inadequate: ‘you don’t measure what you don’t treasure’, so there won’t be data if people don't care enough about it.
On political leadership, we have relatively good data and it's not so hard to measure the participation of women in political spheres if you stick to the macro level. But as you go down to lower levels of government and to local government, the evidence on participation is harder to find.
The bigger issue is that while the global market for government surveys is huge, with studies like the Living Standards Measurements (LSMS), UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), and the Demographic Health Survey (DHS), there is a disconnect between what is collected and how that data is subsequently used. The data is not thoroughly interrogated to understand the gender picture behind the questions, because that is not the focus.
As an example, in a previous role, I was reviewing data from an Asian country which appeared to show no appreciable differences between boys and girls in terms of school enrolment, completion rates and attainment. You could have looked at that data and said, “there’s no gender problem in this country's education system, we don't need to worry about it or change any policies there”.
However, if interrogated further, the data revealed a different story. In the wealthier quintiles of society, girls ended up in school a bit more than boys. But in the poorest quintile of that society, in the bottom 20%, it was very bad news for girls in terms of even getting into school, let alone finishing school, and obtaining decent qualifications.
By not asking that deeper question and interrogating the data in the right way, you could have failed to respond to the needs of about 70 million girls.
There's always a risk of reaching completely different policy conclusions, depending on how you interrogate data and correlate the results. So, yes, we could absolutely do with more data and more measurement tools. But we could also do a lot better with the data we already have.
Grace: How important is it to understand attitudes and perceptions of women and men?
Dan: This topic really relates to the work UN Women have been doing with Kantar on the Gender Attitudes study. Overall, we have an enormous blind spot in terms of evidence on what people think. So much of what determines gender equality – how your parents treated you when growing up, the expectations you have for your career based on what you see in the media, the extent to which a man will think that hitting a woman is acceptable – all of those things have an impact on what we think about women and men.
Attitudes are an enormously important determinant of gender outcome, and in the majority of countries, we have no idea of what those attitudes are exactly.
Further, we don't ask questions about attitudes towards gender equality frequently enough to tell whether they are changing. We don’t measure where interventions could be shifting attitudes for the better, or where a lack of interventions is resulting in attitudes becoming less equal.
UN Women and all our partners are desperately trying to achieve equality in the workplace between women and men. Yet we know that in some countries, high proportions of people, both male and female, believe it is not appropriate for a woman to work outside the home. It begs the question: why are we investing all this money and resource in fighting for equal economic opportunities? Without addressing the attitudes, we're pushing water uphill.
Grace: You have spoken before about “magic bullet” interventions, those that have multiplier effects across the Sustainable Development Goals and can deliver higher returns on investment as well. Could you outline an example of a “magic bullet” intervention?
Dan: To frame the response to this question, let’s remember that there were eight Millennium Development Goals and there are seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.
There are a whole host of challenges facing the world right now: food poverty, serious climate issues, education and school not working for lots of children, etc. If you try and assess how much each would cost to fix, you would find that there just isn't enough money in the world to do it. So, in response we must look at things that have that a very high return on investment in terms of addressing multiple issues at once.
One example really speaks to the heart of what I'm getting at here. Women make up 80% of Africa's farmers. It is a much higher proportion than people realise. Women farmers tend to have less access to investment, and less access to the technologies that drive higher productivity. They tend to have less protection from predatory behaviours from other actors in the market and less capacity to unionise. UN Women has a programme which drives investment to these women farmers.
This enables them not only to develop their capabilities, but also to access the tools necessary to improve their productivity and income, and to pursue increased crop yield through climate-smart agricultural technologies and approaches. These include seeds that are more drought resistant, or dryers that can store crops for longer, as well as access to financial instruments that allow them to pre-sell farming produce. Essentially what we’re doing here, is enabling these women to produce more, and to earn more money. But doing it in a way that is less polluting and better for mitigating climate change impacts in Africa.
Now if we think about the impacts of that approach, firstly it's great for equality: it’s addressing the SDG5. At the same time, it’s reducing poverty. We know that compared to men, women spend vastly more of the money they earn on their families, so there’s a positive knock-on effect on kids in their household.
The women are more likely to be able to afford to send their children to the doctor if they're sick: that’s an important health outcome. With regards to nutrition, the children of these women are much more likely to have the food they need, thereby gaining the micronutrients needed to grow up healthy.
This has an impact not just on their survival chances up to five years, but also on factors that will determine their life outcome in terms of their intellectual capacity. Further, the programme for these women farmers reduces carbon emissions! I could go on…
The point is, with that one intervention of investing a bit of money in improving the capacity of those women who make up 80% of Africa's farmers, you are hitting multiple development goals simultaneously. There are very few areas where interventions can offer this “magic bullet”, where investment can have a multiplier effect in impact on development goals: gender equality, I genuinely believe, is one of them - if not the only one.
Grace: There is plenty of evidence showing that women have been disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. How are organisations like UN Women supporting governments in creating policy that responds to wide ranging economic, health and social implications, whilst preventing deepening gender inequalities?
Dan: Policy and programmes that respond to the needs of women do need to come from a place of evidence and data. Those ROI questions in terms of COVID-19 response and recovery are very prominent, because of the impacts that are being felt on economies around the world and the very reduced fiscal bandwidth we’re seeing. Governments will be very sensitive about what they're spending money on.
The challenge is that we believe the data that we had before should inform how we respond now - and that’s not always the case. New research should not be needed to figure out that if domestic violence in a country was already a problem, COVID-19 will make it worse. If we knew that before the pandemic, women were in vastly more insecure forms of labour than men, it should not require new research for governments to accept that they need special measures to protect women in employment.
Evidence is now emerging on the impacts of the pandemic. One of the studies we conducted in 55 countries shows that roughly the same number of women and men have lost their jobs as a result of COVID-19. But far fewer women than men had jobs going into the pandemic, so that is a proportionately greater impact on women. Again, that shouldn't surprise us because we know that women’s jobs are on average more insecure than men’s – either because they work in the informal sector, or because of the nature of their employment contracts.
Our view is that governments need to ensure that appropriate data is being collected to allow a gender-informed response rather than one which is gender-blind. It is disappointing to see countries’ COVID-19 response packages not being designed in a gender-informed way.
It’s essential that women's voices are heard in the design of those response and recovery plans. There are consultation processes that inform those plans, but whose voices are louder in those consultations? Women must be a part of those consultation processes, because although the virus might not discriminate, the impact of the pandemic does.
