Please sign the petition to keep the category of sex a mandatory question in the 2021 Census:
We oppose the published tentative recommendation by the Office of National Statistics to make sex a non-mandatory field in the 2021 Census. We demand that sex remains a mandatory question in the Census and is included in all government demographic data collection in accordance with SDG5 commitments.
Data collection disaggregated by sex gives us vital information for policy making and distribution of resources. If implemented, the ONS recommendation will make widely acceptable that sex becomes a voluntary question. This will render useless equal opportunities monitoring designed to combat sex discrimination. It will influence governments worldwide making difficult the monitoring of imbalances resulting from sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and unequal treatment of girls and women.
You can sign this petition on the petition.parliament.uk website anytime before 11th April 2018, if 10,000 people sign it the government will respond to this petition and if 100,000 sign this petition will be considered for debate in Parliament.