Focus on Women and Men

Preface

The Czech Statistical Office brings out the publication focusing on the comparison of differences between women and men in various areas of life in the modern society already for the sixth time. Statistical examination of information classified by sex serves to achieve many goals. Differences between men and women rest not only on physical differences, but they are also a cultural and social issue – they lie in different roles in life and preferences. These differences vary in time and space and many of them can complicate life of women and men or even to discriminate them.

Among the basic principles of a democratic state is to secure equal opportunities to all citizens to pursue their aspiration in life, irrespective of whether born as a male or female. Hence statistical data are fundamental objectives not only for a basis for decision-making of general government and legislators, but also for description and checking preconditions to eliminate unjustified differences between genders in daily practice.

This publication ensued, inter alia, from the paragraph 7.3 of the Government resolution No.: 456/2001 dated May 9, 2001 on “Updating trends in pursuing the policy of equal opportunities for men and women”. According to its paragraph No. 7.3 the Government of the Czech Republic assigned to the Czech Statistical Office to publish statistical data on men and woman periodically.

This year’s publication “Focus on Women, on Men” is providing updated statistical data obtained from statistical surveys usually till the end of the year 2004. The same as in the last year, you can find here the tables presenting international data comparisons, too.

Besides updates of time series also some other changes were made. Chapter 2 – Families and households was put together with Chapter 1 – Population, creating thus a more extensive Chapter 1 – Population and families and households, in which no changes were made. As from the next year, the EU-SILC survey will be the data source and therefore it would have no sense to replace “Mikrocenzus 2002” sample survey by another source. Other chapters were given a new number. New tables were added also to Chapter 3 – Education and Chapter 4 – Labour and earnings. In tables on international comparison, the breakdown by country was modified and new tables added, the others are updated or remain unchanged provided that new data were not available.

The final part of the publication includes selected information from the results of some sociological researches and surveys on gender issues. Unlike the previous publication, this part focuses mainly on tables, while the textual part contains only the most important characteristics of selected researches. From researches published by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the CR information interesting from the gender point of view was used from the following two surveys:
1) Trends in Social and Political Mechanisms Influencing Gender Relations,
2) Analysis of Low Number of Women in Political and Decision-making Positions.
Included were also outputs from the survey carried out by DEMA, a.s. (Czech Women’s Union project called “EQUAL – Conditions for Balancing the Professional and Family Life – Partnership in the Family 2001”, E/01/1/043):
1) Labour Market and Consulting – Possibility to Enhance One’s Chances in the Labour Market,
2) Regions and the Labour Market – Influence of Various Circumstances and Factors on Improving Possibilities to Find a Suitable Job.