Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

About - Social indicators for women in Brazil - Second edition

In 2013, the United Nations Statistical Commission organized the Minimum Set of Gender Indicators - MSGI, comprising 63 indicators (52 quantitative and 11 qualitative ones) which reflect the effort to systematize information destined to national production and international harmonization of country and regional statistics about gender equality and women empowerment.

With the release of a second edition on this issue, the IBGE makes available the results of a great part of those quantitative indicators for Brazil, thus filling an important gap in the production of gender statistics. Information is divided into the five domains established by the MSGI – Economic structures and access to resources, Education, Health and related services, Public life and decision-making, and Human rights of women and girls – and provides an overview, however concise, of gender inequality in the country, with valuable elements for reflection of those who study and design public policies. In order to reach that objective, a total 36 of the 52 indicators originally proposed have been developed, and they are complemented by seven other related to each topic, some as proxies of the original ones, but without full data available in Brazil.

Similarly to the previous edition, this one has counted on data from IBGE surveys such as the Continuous National Household Sample Survey - Continuous PNAD, the National Household Sample Survey - PNAD, Population Projections by Sex and Age, Vital Statistics, National Survey of Health - PNS, Survey of Basic State Information - Estadic, Survey of Basic Municipal Information - Munic, as well as data from external sources from the Ministry of Health, the Presidency of the Republic, the National Congress, the Superior Electoral Court - TSE and the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira - INEP.

The current study brings additonal perspectives for the indicators proposed by the MSGI. Whenever possible, data were disaggregated by sex and other characteristics, as a way to evidence differences and disparities. In the Brazilian context, those “other characteristics” play an important role, as evidenced in the social indicators time series that show that being a person with special necessities, living in an urban or rural area, among other conditions, may have a significant effect on people's lives and strngthen inequalities.  

This report is available on the IBGE portal, which also includes the complete table plan, the technical notes for the study, presenting, for each topic, a definition of the indicators according to metadata defined by the United Nations, the statistical sources used and the respective calculation methodology. The tables follow the order of MSGI indicators and are subdivided into thematic folders. Tables for additional indicators are listed as "extra tables" and are also organized by topic.