Focus on Women and Men
Preface | Contents |
The Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) 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 seventh 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 2005. 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. In the chapter “Population and families and households” we added age groups contribution to life expectancy at birth; information on households was taken from two sources: the Labour Force Sample Survey (LFSS) and newly from the SILC 2005 (statistics on income and living conditions). According to a new methodology, time series were recalculated in the part on Education; there are new tables in the chapters “Justice, crime”, “Public life and decision-making” and “Science and technology, information society”. The table “Staffing at management positions of the armed and police forces” was shifted from the chapter “Justice, crime” to “Public life and decision-making”, in which you can newly find also gender information on judges. 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. Firstly, there are results of the CZSO survey, i.e. outputs from the LFSS module on families and households; secondly, you can find there data from researches of other institutions than the CZSO. This part contains mainly tables; the texts include only the most important characteristics of selected researches. Already for the second year, selected information from the research of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the CR called Trends in Social and Political Mechanisms Influencing Gender Relations is available; surveyed was the standpoint of women and men regarding the possibility to obtain work corresponding to their qualification and skills in dependency on the age, education and family status of respondents. Further, questions presented applied to the occurrence of domestic violence and attitude of the respondents to that issue.
Another survey outside the CZSO was a research of T.I.R. in cooperation with the Czech Women’s Union – Role of the father in the family. Selected information is provided in three content areas: 1) Attitudes of respondents to family issues and family policy, 2) Attitudes of respondents to the parental role, and 3) Attitudes of respondents to childcare.
As a parallel to this publication, also an analysis will be published for individual areas; it is to bring attention to gender differences and to comment on major information.