In my search for data on women in labour roles, the data was diverse and often targeted on more than one aspect of labour roles. Following are the major sources:
1. The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics by the United Nations Statistics Division which is an annual publication. It presented data on aspects like women and men in the labour force, employment conditions of women and men, reconciliation of work and family life. The report also compared data of developing and developed countries.
2. Women in labour markets: Measuring progress and identifying challenges presented by the International Labor Office (2010). This reported on aspects like labour utilization and underutilization and the various environments in which women are working. The labour market was studied to understand the access of the labour market opportunities for women in comparison to males, giving a glimpse into the historical trends and the multiple drivers, and analyzing the life-span patterns of female participation.
3. Labour force participation rate (percentage of female population ages 15+) by the International Labor Organization (2019). This data presented is the slightly more “raw” fashion were unlike the previous one which is more analyzed and presented in a form of a report, where the data is given for our interpretation. I personally found it hard to understand how to approach the simple data on the graph chart since there was a lack of parameters and area division or any other supporting information.
Besides these reports and data that are presented in refined/unrefined manner, I also discovered the application of these reports in initiatives like Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) which consume and produce the data for the purpose of “integration of gender issues into the regular production of official statistics for better, evidence-based policies”.
Considering the data, I found on the subject in the light of the past discussion, I am concerned with the intention of the produced data and the political nature attached to these data. The omnipresent comparison of one country to another in almost all the reports is particularly telling and I hope to discuss this idea in class further.

Unit 2B