Gender gaps – we see them across the world, in almost every industry and aspect of our lives. But did you know that there’s a gap between men and women in information itself? Historically, women have been under-accounted for, if they were considered at all. But the female information gap isn’t just a problem of antiquity – it’s present in the digital and non-digital world of today. Data collection is often the first step in creating almost anything – whether it’s a new product or entire systems that we rely on day-to-day – so we end up living with technology and infrastructure designed by men, for men
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Gender gaps – we see them across the world – in almost every industry and aspect of our lives. But did you know that there’s a gap between men and women in information itself? The numbers are in – sort of – and they show who we aren’t counting: women and girls. Historically, women have been under-accounted for, if they were considered at all. But the female information gap isn’t just a problem of antiquity – it’s present in the digital and non-digital world of today. Data collection is often the first step in creating almost anything – whether it’s a new product or entire systems that we rely on day-to-day – so we end up living with technology and infrastructure designed by men, for men.
We know that women today are still faced with so many inequities – but with inadequate data, a clear portrait of that is impossible to display – and makes it easier for people experiencing the benefits of that inequality to deny there even is a problem. Here’s our take on the female information gap, in all its forms, and how filling in the blanks for inclusive data will help define and facilitate gender equality.
The female information gap might be a more recent term, but it’s an old problem. There’s a myriad of ways women’s lives have not been accounted for – and one of the biggest is how history has left their stories untold. Recently, physicist Jess Wade, who, upon realizing that STEM women were grossly underrepresented on Wikipedia, began a quest to write pages for other female scientists and scientists of color, documenting their achievements and discoveries.
Jess Wade: “I became really interested in ways we could try and improve that diversity but also improve the way we celebrate and honor the incredible scientists that are from marginalized backgrounds.” – CBS News
Through her work, she hopes to not only tighten the information gap in her own field, but also “to make science a more accessible and inclusive place to be.”
When women aren’t being left out of record-keeping completely, there’s another way they’re erased: The Matilda Effect named for suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who pointed out back in 1870 that many women’s discoveries and breakthroughs were wrongfully attributed to men. The reason behind the misattributions were simple: When men were named as the publishing author, the research and its findings were seen as more credible and important. Beyond optics, men simply didn’t need (and didn’t want) to give women credit when they could easily receive accolades and prestige for women’s work within male-dominated fields.
The 2017 movie Hidden Figures brought this exact problem into focus – showing the challenges that Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson faced in spite of their outstanding intellectual contributions. Eventually, decades after their work to help America win the space race, they were given proper credit.
Ali Velshi: “Nasa honored Mary Winston Johnston with a ceremony to officially rename its Washington, D.C., building after her…” – The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC
When history paints the picture that women weren’t there – it’s easier to make research for women by women seem like a niche interest unworthy of time and effort even though they account for half the population. Caroline Criado Perez, author of ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ says that – “In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable - from culture, from history, from data. And so, women become invisible.”
And the female information gap is more than missing names and faces. Women’s material, emotional and physical well-being have been essentially ignored throughout history. Take “female hysteria”. Hippocrates, known as the father of modern medicine – coined the term “hysterika” and asserted that a woman’s uterus ran around her body unchecked, causing physical and emotional “female” illnesses. This may sound ridiculous to us now, but “hysteria” was a widely used diagnosis for women experiencing anything from anxiety to loss of sex drive – well into the 20th century. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1980s when the term stopped being used by doctors as a psychological condition.
This, along with countless other assumptions that the female body was unworthy of analysis, led to women being misdiagnosed, diagnosed too late or even dying from lack of research. Women’s symptoms can often present differently than men’s, causing prolonged and unnecessary suffering. This is a combination of medical sexism, where women’s pain or concerns with their bodies is routinely written off as “attention-seeking” or “psychosomatic,” and a lack of diagnostic criterion that includes women . You might think that we would at least have decent diagnostic criteria for health conditions that are specific to female reproductive health, but even then, the medical information is sorely lacking. When a person has endometriosis, which can cause chronic and debilitating pelvic pain and infertility, they will wait an average of eight years for the correct diagnosis.
Without tracking and defining the challenges women face with hard data, it’s impossible to determine how serious the problem is or if we’re making progress. And, in the absence of equitable data, how could we even tell if and when women’s problems are growing?
Shaida Badiee: “For me, biased date means bad data. You know? And bad data means basically leads into bad policies and bad decisions.” – Western Digital
From developing nations to Hollywood, domestic violence to maternal mortality rates – the lack of data-based knowledge and historical documentation of women creates real-life damage. It short-changes women in every way we can imagine: private and public economic resources, accurate representation, unpaid labor, even our medical care.
It can leave us with seemingly trivial issues, like nearly all virtual assistants having a default female voice, a feminine name and a submissive tone in conversation. Or phone’s predictive text having a bias that favors men. But it can also have more serious implications – like creating more injuries for women on the road. According to Scientific American, vehicle safety systems are designed and tested based on the default male (remember that reference man?) – so they don’t protect female bodies as well. On average women have fewer muscles in their neck, tend to weigh less, and are shorter than most men – so even seats and seat belts aren’t made in a way that supports female bodies – making things like whiplash far more common for women than men.
Even basic infrastructure like a city’s snow-clearing schedule can exclude and disadvantage women. Roads are more likely to be swept first, and the sidewalks second. But because women are more likely to walk or use public transportation – and men are more likely to have access to a personal vehicle – women are disadvantaged by design.
Caroline Cridao Perez: “The snow clearing schedule was devised on data that had a gender data gap…they didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women, they just forgot about them.” – Engage 2019
In the town of Umeå, Sweden, once the snow clearing schedule considered gender-specific data, people realized that the year-round number of pedestrian injuries that occurred in winter was 79% – and 69% of those injured were women. When we consider the fact that some of those women injured would have needed professional medical attention – and potentially time off from work to heal – this also becomes an economic issue. All of these gaps in our technology and infrastructure are only the beginning. The same gaps can be found in research on medical care , workplace environments, and domestic violence. We know what happens when women are invisible. So, what happens when they’re present and accounted for?
The female information gap is a complex issue – since there are so many holes in so many different aspects of our history an data – but it is a solvable problem that’s slowly being tackled. Organizations like the U.N. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have started tracking women’s lives globally – a scale we haven’t seen before. With the UN’s program “Making Every Woman and Girl Count,” they’ve broken down the solution for the female information gap into three steps: One - Create an environment to prioritize gender data. Two - Fill gender data gaps by ensuring that quality and comparable gender statistics are produced regularly. And Three - Ensure that data is accessible and used to inform policy and advocacy.
Ginette Azcona: “Women and girls are half of the world’s population; they hold half of the world’s human potential. When their lives are improved the benefits will echo across society.” – UN Women
The five-year program wrapped in 2022 and it resulted in some incredible changes. On a macro level – their program increased gendered data that influenced over 20 different policies or programs – some of which created action to end violence against women, offered women economic empowerment, or even provided better COVID-19 responses. But let’s look at the micro. In Vietnam, Tran Thi Quyt, a blind 60-year-old, served as the main breadwinner for her family of four people. When flooding swept across the province she lived in, she lost all of her poultry and income. Because of the data collected on vulnerable groups, UN Women was able to provide emergency cash grants to 315 flood-affected women-headed households – rebuilding their livelihoods. Tran Thi Quyt was able to buy livestock, seeds and fertilizer, restoring her money-making abilities.
Here’s some data that we do have: According to the Global Gender Gap Report of 2022, gender parity is not recovering – in fact it will take another 132 years to close the global gender gap. Closing the female information gap is our first step toward total gender equity. Without data, we’re organizing and fighting blindly. And once we have it – it’s up to our elected officials to actually use that data to inform policies and create infrastructure that’s inclusive of women.