FinEquity Knowledge Guide: Gender Data and Analysis

Definitions are critical to creating an enabling ecosystem for collecting and using high-quality sex-disaggregated data as a core element of closing the gender gap in financial inclusion. This brief, which is for financial institutions, DFI/IFIs, policymakers and regulators, addresses how to move toward a common set of definitions by determining what exactly needs to be defined, looking at what definitions are currently being used and by whom, and making a set of recommendations to encourage convergence. This guide is also available in Spanish.

This brief makes the case for how sex-disaggregated data can support women’s financial inclusion, looking at use cases in policy and regulation, program and product design, and monitoring, and evaluation. The Annex provides a list of publicly available financial inclusion gender data sources with information on coverage, level of disaggregation, and frequency of data collection. This brief is for decision-makers, program staff, and performance monitoring and evaluation practitioners working for all types of institutions that support financial inclusion.

The objective of this guidance note is to provide guidance to regulated financial institutions - licensed and regulated by the central bank or by any other financial regulatory and supervisory institution – related to the different elements needed to complete the periodic financial data reporting returns or reporting templates using a sex-disaggregated data approach

This report uses examples from a range of FSPs that collect and use sex-disaggregated data effectively to close the gender gap and advance women's financial inclusion. It provides insights on the value of having granular segment-level data about women’s financial needs and how FSPs can leverage this to provide better products and services. The insights and cases presented in this report draw on discussions from a series of roundtables convened by the Women’s Financial Inclusion Data (WFID) Partnership and are complemented by additional primary and secondary research.

This webinar series features Financial Service Providers (FSP) that are using innovative ways to learn and respond to women's differentiated needs and preferences as a key to growing their market share and achieving business goals. FSPs share insights about their successes, failures, and lessons learned on how they were able to benefit from adopting a segmentation approach that involved better understanding the specific needs of different groups of women and designing products and services to better meet their needs, which ultimately translated into increased profitability and impact. 

This tool helps the user develop a business case for the Women’s Market by quantifying the market opportunity and estimating an FSP’s direct financial benefits from strategically targeting the female economy.  Specifically, the tool provides strong groundwork for presenting a strong and convincing argument to senior management on integrating a Women’s Market program into an FSP’s overall strategy. The Business Case Tool combines a wealth of relevant data from respected global data sets with a model that can help FSPs estimate their own potential within the Women’s Market, laying the groundwork for a robust business case for making the female economy a strategic priority. The Excel-based tool also comes with a PDF guide to help the user understand how to best utilize the resource. 

This brief serves as a starting point for stakeholders interested in applying Women's Economic Empowerment (WEE) measurements to their work. Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment in Financial Inclusion (blog) provides context and analysis of how these 11 frameworks and approaches define WEE, the various aspects of WEE that are important to measure, as well as measurement challenges.

This guide is for researchers who want to incorporate a gender analysis into their research planning. It starts with a scale and checklist to evaluate how integrated gender is in research and steps for how to improve gender integration. It also includes a useful list of dos and don'ts and additional resources.  Available in English, Spanish, French and Arabic.

This guide for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners offers tips for overcoming challenges in impact evaluations. It does not provide ready-to-go survey instruments but rather outlines a process for developing indicators along with examples. Appendix 1: examples of WEE survey questions used in previous impact evaluations. Appendix 2: examples of non-survey instruments to measure WEE.

This course, consisting of 11 modules, guides trainers on how to conduct gender statistics training. The materials in each module (syllabus, PPT, exercises, tests, resources) can also be used by individual learners interested in gender data and how to use it. Depending on the subject matter, modules target experts, non-experts, or both. Modules build on each other but can also be used stand-alone. Each module lists the target audience, and how to use the information, and recommends prerequisite modules or knowledge needed for the module. 

Who is this course for and how to use it: 

• Statisticians to understand what gender statistics are and how these can be integrated across different areas of statistics
• Policymakers and decision-makers to enhance their use of gender data for evidence-based decision-making.
• Academicians to inform their research through the use of gender data.
• Civil Society organizations to enhance their use of gender data for advocacy or communication purposes.
• Media personnel to integrate gender data into their media products.