The Equality Data Audit is a new initiative to bring awareness of the available data related to equality and also highlight gaps in the data.
The European Commission’s Subgroup on Equality Data published their ‘Guidelines on the Collection of Equality Data’1 in 2019. The guidelines provide a series of steps and actions to improve the collection and use of Equality data. One of these steps includes a data audit, along with a range of institutional, structural and operational activities.
This work by the CSO on an Equality Data Audit was prompted by these guidelines and also by the requirement of the Equality Budgeting Group in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to know about the availability of equality data.
The Equality Data Audit involved reaching out to public sector bodies and requesting them to fill out an audit template. The returned audits were then collated and reviewed. Some analysis was then completed, highlighting areas where there is a lack of data collected, such as Race and Sexual Orientation, and also areas where there is a large variety of data sets available, such as Age. The full results can be found in the coming chapters.
The Equality Data Audit is planned to be a document that will be periodically updated. The report describes the results and recommendations of the audit with the actual audit attached at the end of the introduction.
In this research we are also interested in updates and feedback from users.
If you notice some data missing from this audit, please submit an update by filling out the form attached here. This form contains a template for including high level details about the data set and more detailed data on the equality variables.
Equality Data Audit July 2020 Template For New Entries (XLS 19KB)
If you use this audit, please fill out the survey below which will help us to improve the next version.
All queries, feedback and updates can be emailed to: sscu@cso.ie
Link to Equality Data Audit:
Equality Data Audit July 2020 Audit File (XLS 416KB)
CSO Publication, 13 October 2020, 11am
Go To: Summary of Outcomes
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.