Data from a gender perspective

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.