Some months ago, a LinkedIn post showcasing an excerpt from the Chasing Financial Equality podcast with Cindy Galop stopped me in my tracks.
I didn’t know who Cindy was. Later, I discovered she’s a brand and business innovator, consultant, coach, and keynote speaker who participated in the UK Apprentice. She’s been building a business out of teaching sex and she’s also a women’s entrepreneur advocate.
Still, that one-minute video in my feedback was so powerful that I didn’t care who was speaking.
“F*ck data. Data does f*ck all.
We have literally for decades had the data you reference that says female founders exit faster, female founders burn less cash, female founders get to profitability quicker, female founders build better business cultures, but none of that data makes any difference.
[…] Information goes through the heart, not the head. It’s not about rationality. It’s about emotion.
The reason women don’t get funded is due to plain old-fashioned sexism and misogyny.”
My background is in engineering and computer simulation and I’m Director of Scientific Support and Customer Operations for a tech corporation. I’m also a diversity and inclusion advocate. I’ve been using data for 30 years for everything I’ve done.
Using simulation to guide the development of new materials, leading the migration of all our customer support data after an acquisition, monitoring customer satisfaction KPIs, supporting the business case for enhanced maternity leave in the company I work for, and surveying professional women about the impact of COVID-19 on their unpaid work are only a few examples.
Still, Cindy’s post triggered an epiphany.
I began to recall all the ways data — or its absence — has been manipulated to foster gender inequality. From entrenching the status quo to promoting “busy work”, wearing out activists, or even benefiting those who profit from inequality.
Let’s show you what I found.
Gender Data Myths
“In God we trust, all others bring data.”
Data has been heralded as the key to innovation, solving systemic issues, and exponential growth (Big Data anyone?). We “just” need data, don’t we?
In theory, women have accounted for half of the population throughout humanity. We should have collected millions of data points over millennia. How come we haven’t solved gender inequality yet?
Because we’ve been using data against women.
At a time when we abide by the creed “data is the new oil”, it cannot be a coincidence that we’re solving this “data problem”
Here are the 7 ways data is weaponised against gender equity.
Lack of data
In the absence of data, we will always make up stories.
Recorded historical contributions to science and humanities — medicine, literature, chemistry, philosophy, politics, or engineering — have XY chromosomes.
From that “data”, the world feels very comfortable making up stories about the reasons why “progress” has been driven by men. If we have data, we must have a story about it.
The story we’re told about the lack of data on women’s contributions is that women haven’t contributed. Yes, for millennia, women were just in the background waiting for men to learn about fire, cure their children, or bring money home.
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