MARGE FAUVELLE∗ Mapping gender differences and measuring gender inequality in science and research –

the European perspective There have been strong calls for «more and better sex-disaggregated data » at EU level ever since the inception of a Women & Science initiative. A strong statistics programme has therefore been implemented as an integral part of the Women and Science Policy Unit in DG Research. Today I am going to outline the main areas of work undertaken by the Women and Science Statistical Programme, concentrating in particular on what has been achieved so far, and giving a couple of examples of some new equality and gender-sensitive Science & Technology indicators, in line with the objectives of this session and the conference as a whole. Because of the policy importance for a range of stakeholders of the question of human resources in European Science, and due to the increasing recognition of the potential value of women scientists in the economy, there has been extremely rapid development in the availability of comparable sex-disaggregated statistics in the last few years. In concrete terms, Eurostat and OECD have both started collecting the sex breakdown for the human resource variables in R&D since 2002, (Eurostat since 2001 for the candidate countries). OECD collects data for R&D personnel by sector of the economy, occupation and sex in both Head Count and Full-time equivalent and Eurostat collects the breakdown of Researchers by sector, main field of science and sex and will introduce the NACE codes by sex next year for the BES. Eurostat collects the sex breakdown for researchers in Head Count across all sectors and by main field of science in the Higher Education Sector and Government research institutions. Age by sex and citizenship by sex for researchers was collected by Eurostat for the first time in 2003 in the framework of the R&D Benchmarking Questionnaire. The forthcomin