Program Specialist, UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

Developing better measures of gender equality in STEM: the UNESCO SAGA project
Plenary: Improving quality of STEM gender equality indicators

Martin Schaaper, a Dutch national, is Head of the Science, Technology and Innovation Statistics unit and the Communication and Information Statistics unit at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, based in Montreal, Canada.  He oversees three global data collections conducted by the Institute, on R&D statistics, innovation statistics and ICT in education statistics, and is responsible for the dissemination of these data on the UIS website, in UIS reports and in the databases and reports of a variety of partners. He is also responsible for capacity building and training activities in developing countries in these areas, and for the development of relevant methodologies.  He is also steering SAGA (STEM and Gender Advancement), a global UNESCO project supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). The aim of SAGA is to contribute to improving the situation of women and reducing the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields in all countries at all levels of education and research.

The objectives of SAGA are:

• to analyse how policies affect the gender balance in STEM;
• to undertake inventories of science, technology and innovation (STI) gender equality policies;
• to develop new and better indicators to provide tools for evidence-based policy-making;
• to build capacity in Member States for data collection on gender in STEM;
• to prepare methodological documents to support the collection of statistics.