Women with disability in Europe: The need to collect data in accordance with the UN Convention for the Rights of People with Disability and the biopsychosocial framework of ICF

The United Nations ‘Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ in its articles 31 specifically requests to collect data about health and disability in order to construct and implement policies which promote the rights of persons with disabilities. The same source recognizes that women and girls with disability are subject to multiple discrimination, and calls State Parties to promote and safeguard anti-discrimination of women with disability by ensuring their equal and full enjoyment of their fundamental freedoms and human rights (Article 6), and their access to social protection and poverty reduction programmes (Article 28). Thus it is important to have gender oriented disability data for policy development. In recent years, various European Institutions have highlighted the lack of data on people with disabilities; the difficulty to compare data collected between different institutions and countries due to the absence of a common definition of disability and methodology of data collection; the lack of information in many areas related to disability (e.g., access to social and health services, independent living, rehabilitation, assistance and support); and finally the lack of gender perspective regarding women with disabilities. For its holistic approach, which describes disability as a multi-dimensional phenomenon defined as the interaction between features of the individual’s health status and features of his or her physical, social and attitudinal environment, ICF has been considered as the best conceptual model for a common definition of disability by researchers and policy analysts. Using ICF framework for data collection could help to have a clearer idea of how measuring disability and which are the information relevant for policy development, since information on all levels of functioning is essential for policy purposes. Therefore the ICF biopsychosocial model is suitable for linking data collected and highlight missing information. The aim of our research is to present available and updated data on women with disabilities in Europe linking these data to ICF and highlighting gaps and needs in order to encourage new ICF-based data collection that can support the development and implementation of evidence based policies which promote rights so as to respect the mandate of UN Convention on the rights of people with disability.