What can internationally comparable quantitative data tell us about how gender norms are changing?

This toolkit outlines how standardised national surveys, opinion data and administrative data from developing countries, collected at regular intervals, can reveal important information about how gender norms affect adolescent girls, and whether prevailing norms are changing.

It describes the main data available to help identify how gender norms are changing in a given country or context. It looks at the usefulness of data from three main sources: regular household surveys; opinion or perception surveys; and administrative data collected by governments at different levels (such as region, district, zone or village).

The toolkit explores how survey data can be useful for understanding trends in gender norms, exploring links between attitudes, practices and social and demographic characteristics, and making comparisons across countries and regions. It also acknowledges the limitations of using such data, such as the failure of surveys, in some contexts, to reflect girls’ own attitudes, to capture local nuances and to include information from the most marginalised groups and communities, for example, those living in remote or conflict-affected areas.