Focused on Women and Men
Preface | Contents |
The Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) brings out already the eighth publication in a row focusing on comparison of differences between women and men in various areas of life in modern society. Statistical examination of data classified by sex serves to achieve many goals. Differences between men and women rest not only on physical differences, but they also pose a cultural and social issue – women and men play different roles in life and have different preferences. These differences vary in time and space and many of them may complicate the life of women and men or even discriminate them.
One of basic principles of a democratic state is to secure equal opportunities to all citizens so that they could pursue their aspiration in life, irrespective of whether born as a male or female. Statistical data serve a basis for decision-making of the general government and legislators, and, they can also be used for description and checking of preconditions to eliminate unjustified differences between genders in everyday practice.
This publication ensued 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 requested the Czech Statistical Office to publish statistical data on men and woman periodically.
This year’s publication “Focus on Women, on Men” provides updated statistical data obtained from statistical surveys usually until the end of the year 2006. The same as in the last year, you can find there the tables presenting international data comparisons, too.
In addition to the time series updates some other changes were made as well. Tables for this issue were slightly amended (for example in chapters Population, families and households, Health or Labour and wages) and some new information on the number of paid out pensions by the age of pensioners, women and men in the Army of the Czech Republic or on researchers by age groups was added). Few new tables for the international comparison were introduced, mainly in the chapter Labour and wages (for example entrepreneurs by sex and selected branches). However, in some tables presented in the chapter Justice and crime for the sentenced persons the data for 2006 are missing because the General Directorate of the Prison Service of the Czech Republic had to cope with some technical problems.
The final part of the publication includes selected information on 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 elderly people; 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 third 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 depending on 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 on drug dependency.
As a parallel to this publication, also an analysis will be published focusing on elderly people, families and households and providing characteristics of male and female candidates (as well as on elected representatives) in different types of elections in the CR with the aim to bring attention to gender differences and to comment on major information.