Holly Cairns
Question:93. Deputy Holly Cairns asked the Taoiseach his views on the Central Statistics Office automatically assigning male or female sex to those who choose not to declare on the 2022 census form. [15065/22]
View answerTuesday, 22 March 2022
Questions (93)
Written answers
Under Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/543, the CSO is legally obliged to produce data on sex with response options limited to male and female only in Census 2022. This is reflected in Question 2 on the census form which asks “What is your sex?” with response options of “Male” and “Female”.
CSO launched a public consultation on the content of the Census 2022 questionnaire in late 2017. As part of this consultation, members of the public and interested stakeholders were invited to submit their requests for new questions and revisions to existing questions. To assist the CSO in assessing the submissions, a Census Advisory Group (CAG) was formed. Membership of the CAG was drawn from organisations and groups who regularly use census data. The CAG made recommendations on which new and revised questions should be tested during a Census Pilot survey which was held in September 2018. Following the Pilot, the CAG assisted the CSO in deciding which questions should be recommended to government for inclusion on the census form.
During the consultation process, several submissions were made requesting a new question on gender identity. As gender identity is an emerging area for statistical data collection, the CAG proposed that the CSO should test and develop a new question that would capture robust data on gender identity before it should be considered for inclusion on a census. Subsequent to the consultation, the CSO has introduced a new gender identity question on both a household survey and as part of the new PULSE surveys. The CSO’s view is that the new question has performed well and that it will be recommended for Pilot testing as part of the preparations for the next census. Inclusion of the new gender identity question in the next census will be subject to approval by the CAG and ultimately by government.
The CSO is aware that in the absence of a question on gender identity on the census form, some members of the public may have difficulty in responding to the question on sex as it appears on the census form. In order to make the census as inclusive as possible, the CSO has advised that for people who have such a difficulty, they can mark both male and female boxes.
In order to meet the aforementioned EU regulation, the CSO is legally obliged to categorise the sex of all persons on the census as either male or female. When both response options have been marked on the census form, the CSO will be required to impute a value of either male or female to each digital record. The imputation of these values will reflect the distribution of the sex variable across the population, which is approximately 50/50. The digital data will be used as the basis for census statistical publications and will only be released in aggregated form.
The CSO will not make any amendments to the paper forms returned from the public. Thus, should someone mark both boxes in the sex question on their census form, this paper record will remain unchanged and will be what is made public 100 years after the census in line with Section 35 of the Statistics Act 1993.
Census 2022 also contains a new time capsule section which provides a space on the form where households have the option to write a message of their choosing. Along with the rest of the census forms, these messages will be placed in secure storage until the release of the forms after 100 years. The time capsules provide an opportunity for members of the public to record information not otherwise captured on the census form.