Sociedad y bienestar

During 2018, a large number of acts and demonstrations that sought to promote gender equality have taken place. The feminist demonstrations of March 8 or the #metoo movement (which began at the end of 2017) highlighted the need to promote real equality in all society sectors.

Open data, just as it have contributed in other fields, such as health, tourism or entrepreneurship, can be a very useful tool to help achieve gender equality. But first it is necessary to overcome a series of challenges, such as:

• The existence of a gender gap in data: data disaggregated by sex allows us to understand if there are inequalities between people of different gender and make decisions that can help reduce those inequalities. However, there are still significant shortcomings in this type of data.
• Few women in open data ecosystem: As in other technological sectors, the number of women that participate in open data ecosystem is reduced. This means that their vision and concens are sometimes left out of the debate table. As an example, The Feminist Open Government Initiative was created to encourage governments and civil society to defend gender advances in a context of open government, but it is mainly managed by male members.

To solve these challenges, various groups of women have been created, such as Open Heroine, composed of more than 400 women worldwide working in the fields of open government, open data and civic technology. It is a virtual space where women can share their experiences and reflect on the challenges they face, as well as promote a higher presence of women in the open data discussion groups. This association was responsible for one of the pre-events held within the framework of the last International Open Data Conference. Through a "do-a-thon" format, they created working groups to try to solve challenges such as the prevention of femicides or the gender gap in data from Buenos Aires city.

In Spain, there are also organizations trying to boost the presence of women in these fields, but from a general point of view. For example, the project "I want to be an engineer", from the University of Granada, seeks to boost the presence of women in careers related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). For this, they visit secondary education centers, and an Engineering Fair and a summer campus are held. It should be pointed out that, although women represent 54% of the Spanish university population, they only are 10% in ICT careers, according to Ministry of Education data.

Another example is the "Women and open data" space of Barcelona Open Data Initiative. This space shows visualizations as the result of 3 events organized by Barcelona Open Data to explore open data sources and solve social challenges related to women: Data X Women, Wiki-Data-Thon and Women Poverty and Precariousness Index. These visualizations allow us to see gender differences in areas such as home care and street maps in big cities such as Barcelona. They also promote the creation of digital solutions that facilitate the respond to these differences.

Women are 50% of society and they should be represented in all areas. Although its presence is increasing in the open data community (as Aporta Meeting showed), there is still work to be done: we need more gender data and more spaces to analyze and try to solve the women challenges using open data.

GIS4tech is a Spanish Spin-Off company founded in 2016, as a result of the research activity of the Cluster Territorial group and the Department of Urban Planning of the University of Granada. GIS4tech is dedicated to technical assistance, advice, training, research and development supported by Geographic Information Systems and related technologies. The team has more than 20 years of experience in territory studies, elaboration of cartographies and Geographic Information Systems.

More than half of the world's population are women, who also play a key role in our society. For example, it is women who grow, produce and sell more than 90% of locally grown food. Paradoxically, these same women are beneficiaries of only 1% of agricultural loans and receive less than 1% of public contracts. One of the reasons for this growing discrimination is precisely the scarcity of the availability of the gender data required to adequately evaluate public policies and ensure that women are included and their particular needs taken into account.

As we see, far from taking advantage of the benefits promised by open data and appart from suffering the usual discrimination due to gender issues, women around the world are now also forced to live a new form of discrimination through the data: women have less online presence than men; they are generally less likely to be heard in the consultation and design phase of data policies; they are less valued in the rankings of data scientists and usually they do not even have representation in official statistics.

The goals defined through the Sustainable Development Goals include a specific objective to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women. However, even though we already have a great variety of data disaggregated by sex, a recent study by the United Nations has detected the existence of  important gender data gaps when dealing with these specific sources of discrimination in such relevant areas such as health, education, economic opportunities, political participation or even one's physical integrity.

Ending discrimination will be a much more difficult task if you do not even have the basic data necessary to understand the extent of the problem to solve it. Therefore, an important first step is to make the most of the already available data, but also be able to clearly visualize these deficiencies. Political commitment at the highest level is very high with initiatives such as the Global Data Alliance for Sustainable Development, the Open Data Charter or the African Consensus on Data, showing their explicit support for more inclusive data policies. Nevertheless, this commitment has not materialized, as even today only 13% of governments include in their budgets the regular collection of gender data.

In order to close this new digital gender gap, a new comprehensive approach will therefore be necessary to identify the necessary data, ensure that this data is collected and shared as open data, conduct training actions so the interested parties can understand and analyze these data by themselves and enable dialogue and participation mechanisms to ensure that public budgets adequately capture these needs.

In an increasingly digital world, without equality of data, we will not be able to understand the totality of the reality about women's life and well-being, nor reach true gender equality to make each and every one of women  be taken into account.