Despite Ukraine’s successes in the field of open data, one of the critical issues that are often overlooked is its gender sensitivity. Most of the available open data sets do not meet the requirements of regulatory legal acts and have a low level of disaggregation, relevance, availability, and quality.

Such results were shown by the research “Gender component in open data of Ukraine”, prepared within the framework of the USAID / UK aid Project Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services (TAPAS) with the assistance of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine and the support of the Eastern Europe Foundation.

Open data, disaggregated by gender and other social indicators, helps to obtain valuable information about the current state of rights and opportunities for women, men, and their various groups, including the vulnerable, to see gender gaps and possible discrimination. Such data are an important tool for developing, implementing, and monitoring gender-responsive policies, inclusive solutions and services in various spheres of life. Analysis of data not distributed by gender, in turn, leads to erroneous conclusions and loss of resources.

The analysis of the existing open data sets proved that they are mostly not synchronized with the normative legal acts in the field of implementation of the national gender policy. The analyzed data, for the most part, do not meet the principles of relevance and availability, and are difficult to analyze, read, and process. Among them, for example, the data sets “Number of Bank Clients and Number of Accounts Opened by Clients” owned by the National Bank of Ukraine, the Unified State Register of Perpetrators of Corruption or Related to Corruption Offenses owned by the NACP, the Unified State Automated Register of Persons Eligible for Benefits owned by the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, medical statistical reporting, etc. The level of involvement of representatives of public organizations in the formation and evaluation of data sets is low, especially those experts who work in the fields of gender equality, inclusiveness, and anti-discrimination.

Based on the research results, general conclusions were formed regarding the need and opportunities to increase the gender sensitivity of open data and practical recommendations for each of the analyzed sets. Data owners of relevant datasets can use the developed guidelines to ensure their gender sensitivity.

The research and recommendations are available by the link: https://tapas.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/OD-research_EN.pdf