Joann Vanek

Gender and social statistics, informal employment and informal economy statistics, labour statistics and the use of statistical data in advocacy

As the director of WIEGO’s Statistics Programme until 2018, Joann contributed to a number of flagship publications, including Women and Men in the Informal Economy (ILO 2018) for the International Labour Organization, WIEGO Working Paper No. 2: Statistics on the Informal Economy: Definitions, Regional Estimates and Challenges and the ILO’s 2013 Measuring Informality: A Statistical Manual on the Informal Sector and Informal Employment.

She leads the Programme’s work on the WIEGO Statistical Briefs and participates in ILO technical working groups on topics relevant to WIEGO concerns: The Technical Advisory Group for Improving Statistics on the Informal Sector, the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy and the Technical Working Group on the Measurement of Care Work.

Joann is a leading expert on statistics in the informal economy and was a driving force behind major progress in the collection of those statistics, which resulted in the first global estimates. These estimates revealed that 61 per cent of the world’s workers were informally employed.

Prior to working with WIEGO, Joann spent 20 years at the United Nations Statistics Division, where she led the development of the gender statistics programme. She coordinated the production of three issues of the UN report on The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics. The 1995 issue that she coordinated was an official document for the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing.

Joann holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, where her research and findings on women and housework earned her the status of a pioneer in women’s studies.