'I first came across the gender data gap in the world of medicine in 2014, when I was writing my first book. I was just so shocked that this was an issue in the 21st century, that doctors were misdiagnosing women because the symptoms of our heart attacks don’t confirm to those of men. And that women were more likely to die and more likely to be misdiagnosed. Around that same time I also found out that we don’t tend to involve female humans or animals or cells in medical trials, and the result of that is women have less effective treatment and more side effects.'
https://time.com/collection/davos-2020/5764698/gender-data-gap/
'From cars that are 71% less safe for women than men (because they’ve been designed using a 50th-percentile male dummy), to voice-recognition technology that is 70% less likely to accurately understand women than men (because many algorithms are trained on 70% male data sets), to medication that doesn’t work when a woman is on her period (because women weren’t included in the clinical trials), we are living in a world that has been designed for men because for the most part, we haven’t been collecting data on women. This is the gender data gap.'
- The key element of interest in this is that it is so shocking, when I found out about this I was really surprised.
- Thinking this is a heavy project, do I want to do something this big?, feels as though I won't be able to solve the issue. What would I be able to do? Educate people? Display the facts?
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00899.x
Having no data is bad enough, but substandard data is arguably more insidious, particularly when the data systematically misrepresent reality in such a way as to make women appear to be more dependent and less productive than they actually are.
Surveys can be designed in a way that minimises the role of women in the family and economic life. Many surveys are constructed using the head of the household as the anchor for the household roster and other family members are defined in relation to the head. For example interviewer instructions for the Demographic and Health Surveys (used in more than 85 countries) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (60 countries) say: “A household head is a usual resident member of the household acknowledged by the other members of the household as the household head. This person may be acknowledged as the head on the basis of age (older), sex (generally, but not necessarily, male), economic status (main provider), or some other reason”.
The assumption that men are most often the heads of household – a view explicitly stated in many survey module instructions, and held by enumerators and respondents alike – undercounts women who fulfil this role.
Data by itself does not bring about improvements, but it provides the evidence necessary to prompt policy‐makers into action, to generate investments and to demonstrate the effectiveness of interventions.
Evidence on Data and Gender Equality (EDGE), a multi‐agency collaboration implemented by the UN Statistical Division and UN Women, is developing measures and international guidelines on entrepreneurship and individual assets, including land and credit. 'Data can be a powerful tool in the hands of women's advocates. Without it, the ability to influence policy, track progress and demand accountability has been hampered.'
EDGE https://unstats.un.org/edge/
The Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) project is a joint initiative of the United Nations Statistics Division and UN Women that seeks to improve the integration of gender issues into the regular production of official statistics for better, evidence-based policies.
The Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) project is a joint initiative of the United Nations Statistics Division and UN Women that seeks to improve the integration of gender issues into the regular production of official statistics for better, evidence-based policies.
Globally, close to 80 percent of countries regularly produce sex-disaggregated statistics on mortality, labor force
participation, and education and training.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26384264.pdf
In May at this year's Women Deliver conference, Melinda Gates announced an $80 million
investment to close the gender data gap.
Gender data include data describing males and females separately.
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