Focus on Women and Men
Preface | Contents |
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 fifth 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 females’ life aspirations 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 2003 year. The same as in the last year, you can find here the tables presenting international data comparisons, too.
Besides updated time series there are also some changes in the contents. This time, the data source for information on families and households, which is not available in continuous time series, was the “Mikrocenzus 2002” sample survey. Together with some tables containing also data from the 2001 Population and Housing Census it makes Chapter 2 – Families and Households. In Chapter 3 – Health you can newly find information on incidence of selected diseases and on the amount and structure of costs for health care of the sickness insured. There is also a new Chapter 9 – Science and Technology, Information Society that presents our society from the point of view of possibilities and abilities to use information technology and modern means of communication.
In the final part of the publication you can find short abstracts from two opinion polls carried out by the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the CR. One of the polls was focused on the position of women in the labour market and the other on the support for men taking parental leave. The unabridged versions of the final reports on these polls are available at the website of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (www.mpsv.cz).