Deliverable 3.1 of the UNTWIST project: Surveys gender coverage and bias

This report is the first deliverable outcome of Work Package 3 (WP3) of the UNTWIST project. The aim of WP3 is to analyse the representation of sex/gender and gender-based needs (GBNs) in public opinion instruments and public opinion data. Political and sociological surveys are one of the main tools that political parties use to obtain information about citizens’ needs and demands. It is important to understand what GBNs are present and absent in survey instruments to establish whether surveys fairly represent the wider spectrum of citizens’ gender-related needs and demands and to gain insight into parties’ policy development and positions on gender-based issues.

This deliverable report (D3.1) presents a descriptive analysis of the representation of sex/gender in large scale cross-national and national political and sociological survey instruments. In combination with D3.2, which measures public opinion on gender issues in cross-national and national surveys, this deliverable contributes to GO1: “To advance knowledge of how feminism, sex- and gender-based needs and demands are substantively represented by mainstream and extreme populist parties to test the idea that extreme populist parties are acting as niche parties in relation to sex- and gender-based demands”.

This report provides the rationale underlying the analysis of the presence/absence of GBNs in survey questionnaires (Section 2) and outlines our process for collecting and analysing survey question data (Sections 3 and 4). In brief, this comprised constructing a dictionary of sex/gender-related key words to collect questions in large-scale academic-led surveys fielded since the year 2000, both cross-nationally at the European level and at the national level in six countries (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK). This data was analysed via quantitative content analysis, using an original coding protocol that was developed from the Typology of GBNs produced in WP1 (D1.1). In the remainder of the report (Section 5), we present the results of our descriptive analysis. Our key findings highlight that at in both cross-national and national survey questionnaires, GBNs are largely present in three core areas:

1. Measurement of the presence/location/extent of discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, and sexual identity
2. Measurement of attitudes and behaviours regarding men and women’s gender roles in the family
3. Measurement of gender and sexual orientation discrimination in the labour market and evaluation of measures to support families

While our analysis also indicates that certain GBNs are more salient within specific national contexts, on the whole we find that survey measurement of GBNs in both cross-national and national contexts is narrowly concentrated into these core areas. Consequently, we expose gaps in the measurement of GBNs beyond the family and the labour market in areas such as education, health, and transnational politics. Additionally, our analysis shows that solutions to GBNs in both cross-national and national survey instruments are limited to these corresponding issue areas and are narrowly focused on legal protection against discrimination and on the provision of resources to support families. We conclude that the level of feminist permeation of both cross-national and national survey instruments is mixed, but generally weak. Our findings therefore make an important contribution to the evaluation of the demand and supply of GBNs in national contexts in WP5 and in the development of our own original survey module in WP6.