We live in a man’s world, and it doesn’t take a long look around to figure out how true that is. In a world lacking female leaders, statues and stories, we may think we have acknowledged every way it affects us today. But according to UN Women, we may not be accounting for the biggest gap of all.
The organization explains that in a rapidly-advancing world, “gaps in gender data and the lack of trend data make it difficult to monitor progress for women and girls.” This means that while we continue to acknowledge and combat global social inequities, these problems may only present half the picture, and there’s a complete possibility that we are approaching them in the wrong way.
This is the gender data gap, where the lack of worldwide data renders women and girls invisible in the grand scheme of change, and it may affect your everyday life more than you think.
In her book Invisible Women, campaigner and author Caroline Criado-Perez details how systemic discrimination against women has actually built the world around us. Through case studies, she shows how aspects of life like “phones being too big for your hands” or women being “47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car accident” actually evolve from a lack of foundational data, and as you can imagine, the results can be catastrophic.
In her research, Criado-Perez found that these gaps extend to the health sector as well, where doctors “prescribe a drug that is wrong for your body” or “misdiagnose your cardiovascular problems.” Did you know men and women have different symptoms of heart attacks and cardiovascular diseases?
In this manner, the gender data gap can be seen as one of the many reasons for the gender pay gap. If women are globally invisible, there is a systemic base for the consistent improper recognition of the hours of work done by women in a week or the lack of corporate promotions and bonuses for women.
The gap is about more than just numbers. Data is based on humans and represent people and stories. This is just another way women, their impacts or their wants for change are being silenced or erased.
In the civil rights and government policy sector, this leads to an inaccurate representation of female issues and even voting tendencies. In the technological sector, it means more products or algorithms are trained on male-dominant data models, and therefore may not work the same for women.
In today’s world, data affects what words get spread and how it gets spread. Politicians or companies are not going to launch policies or products that they think will not garner support, and they test this hypothetical support based on past data. It’s a repetitive cycle, a loophole of invisibility.
Luckily, Criado-Perez leaves us with some action items at the end of her book, some ways we can close this empty chasm of data. We can get more women into research and into positions of impact. Female-led projects contain gender analysis that “takes place in a way that it doesn’t when there aren’t women involved.” We can also make sure to push for legislative change, putting actual policy into place to account for representation in data.
In order to ensure some closure in this gap, it is important to educate ourselves about it and use it to fuel our decisions. It’s okay to be angry about it; in fact, I encourage it. Just use that anger to push for change and remind people that this isn’t just a world built for men.