Femcities Conferences
City of Vienna Department for Women's Affairs
Areas of inequality and equality need to be represented and made visible through data to encourage fact-based policy and decision making.
The Vienna Gender Equality Monitor uses available empirical data to make the state of equality between women and men in Vienna measurable and visible, while also tracking changes over time. The full report and detailed charts in German can be found at:
The Vienna Gender Equality Monitor was developed to measure and analyse the status quo and development of equality of men and women on the basis of empirical data. The twelve topic areas and 160 indicators chosen for the report reflect a broad understanding of equality. They are oriented on concrete equality goals developed by the City of Vienna Department for Women's Affairs (MA 57) together with other specialist departments and experts of the City of Vienna as well as external researchers (cf. “Methodology” below). The first Vienna Gender Equality Monitor presented the status quo of equality, explained the equality issues in each area, and discussed the availability and explanatory power of the data used.
Three and eight years later, the data was updated and indicators show the developments over time. In 2016, the monitor had a special focus on migration, while the most recent monitor had a focus on the effects of COVID-19.
The Vienna Gender Equality Monitor provides the empirical basis for the development of measures for the promotion of women in Vienna.
Women and men in Vienna (A), political participation (B), education and training (C), paid and unpaid work (D), leisure time and sports (E), art and media (F), income (G), poverty and social security (H), housing and public space (I), environment and mobility (J), violence (K), and health (L).
Based on discussions in expert workshops, the following principles were formulated for the Vienna Gender Equality Monitor.
The Gender Equality Monitor focuses on the discrimination of women, meaning that the areas of interest are selected with regards to the relevance of the problems for women. Areas in which improvements are needed for men are not explicitly discussed in this report. However, the equality aspects that are included in the report are shown for both women and men.
The Gender Equality Monitor includes only indicators that refer to an equality-related problem. General goals that are not relevant for equality issues were not included.
The focus of the Gender Equality Monitor is on targets. The monitoring programme is intended to monitor the development of equality-related aspects, not evaluate measures or projects of the City of Vienna. Therefore, results of measures are only considered when target results cannot be measured, e.g. increasing the participation in specific services that provide advice or support (e.g. clients of the Vienna Homeless Services).
The Gender Equality Monitor uses available data sources and processes available data; no separate surveys are conducted. Therefore, a wide range of different data sources is used, including administrative data, survey data, official statistics, information from websites, and information provided by institutions for the purpose of this report.
The Gender Equality Monitor will be published in regular intervals. Therefore, it includes primarily indicators that can be observed over time, i.e. where the data sources on which they are based are available continuously or in suitable intervals.
The indicators in the Gender Equality Monitor all refer to Vienna, although they describe different populations, e.g. people living in Vienna, people working in Vienna, or students at schools and universities in Vienna.
The indicators of the Gender Equality Monitor are based solely on available data. This frequently limits the development of indicators. Such limitations are discussed in the report. This includes data sources that contain no information on gender or other social characteristics, that do not adequately depict the realities of women’s lives, or that have not been prepared in a way that would allow evaluation by gender. Such missing data will be discussed explicitly to provide a basis for the further development of data sources and indicators.
