A/HRC/33/49 more inclusive, transparent and grounded in legally binding international human rights commitments. OHCHR has developed a guidance note on data and disaggregation.67 70. The rapid development of technology has made it possible to leverage data from new sources. There is a great opportunity to connect official statistics to citizen-generated data. States must therefore support the crucial role played by civil society, women’s organizations in particular. In addition to developing innovative ways of collecting data, civil society also brings qualitative value in analysing and interpreting results to make sure that gaps in monitoring are detected and that gender-specific needs are taken into account. 71. Under the framework of the Millennium Development Goals, data disaggregated by gender was not reported in a standardized fashion. There is not much data available on intra-household inequalities in terms of access to and use of sanitation and menstrual hygiene facilities or in terms of intersecting factors such as disability and age. The household cannot be considered as a homogeneous unit: its members have different roles, opinions and experiences. Finding ways to monitor intra-household inequalities may be pivotal in order to reveal gender inequalities and root causes of inequality that often remain invisible in household-level analyses. There might be a stark divide in terms of perspectives in household monitoring. A household member could respond differently to a household survey depending on whether that person is a man or a woman or has a disability. 72. In addition, it would be important to monitor how gender inequalities, including among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming persons, manifest themselves in extra-household settings, including in facilities in public institutions. This would reveal gender inequalities in the realm of many other human rights, since a lack of access to facilities outside the home severely impedes women and girls from attending school and participating in work, among other opportunities. 73. A project on gender-sensitive water monitoring, assessment and reporting that included several toolkits was initiated in the context of the World Water Assessment Programme.68 The toolkits show the difficulties inherent in using quantitative methods to capture the nuances of gendered power relations and the socioeconomic processes that create or sustain gender inequalities in access to water and sanitation. They also underscore that some women may attend meetings because regulations on participation tell them to do so but that cultural norms may keep them from speaking up or being listened to. It may therefore be useful to integrate quantitative data with qualitative methods, for meaning and interpretation. On the basis of the findings of qualitative surveys, other quantitative indicators can be developed to fill the gap left by previous indicators. Counting the number of heads at meetings may then be accompanied with indicators that include the number of contributions made in meetings by women and men and the percentage of decisions on water and sanitation adopted on the basis of those contributions. 74. A recent study underscored that gender-differentiated patterns are not the same everywhere and reinforced the importance of context for understanding the gender dimensions of access and experience.69 The quantity and quality of sex-disaggregated data at the micro level are considered to be better than those of data at the global level. It is therefore important that measuring progress in the rights to water and sanitation and gender equality is not based on global monitoring and on the use of quantitative data only. Context-specific studies and monitoring that capture the intersection of gender inequalities 67 68 69 See www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/HRIndicators/GuidanceNoteonApproachtoData.pdf. See www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/indicators/. Leila Harris and others, “Intersections of gender and water: comparative approaches to everyday gendered negotiations of water access in underserved areas of Accra, Ghana, and Cape Town, South Africa”, Journal of Gender Studies (2016), p. 13. 19