Our project group, Count Us 2! WA, is made up of women whose curiosity was sparked after reading Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed For Men, a book by Caroline Criado Perez. In her book, we learned about surprising and costly impacts that conventional data-gathering practices can have on women - impacts that cross racial and socio-economic lines. These practices have negatively affected women for a long time and include things like safety in car accidents, park planning, medical practices, personal protective equipment, financial planning, and even snowplowing. We wanted to do something about it!

 

We discovered that by changing the way data is gathered and analyzed, we could

• help save lives; 

• help assure that public policy decisions looked at more than age-old assumptions that say that female needs are the same as male needs;

• enlist support for the voices of BIPOC;

• save public funds, and in many cases, injuries; and, 

• rest easier at night knowing real equality may be closer at hand!

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We are seeking an addendum to all legislative bills  of government institutions (city, county, state) that says any data collected, using public funds, should disaggregate the data by gender and race.  This would assure that the experiences, needs, and wants of women and BIPOC would be acknowledged and accounted for instead of being hidden in the aggregation of data most often used currently.

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We're reaching out to you based on our shared interest in women’s issues and involvement in “work” that includes advocacy for social justice and a focus on the greater good. We're hoping that you’d like to learn more, too. We're also hoping you'll reach out to us with questions or suggestions or a decision to join us! 

 

If you’re wondering how you might get involved in this awareness-building campaign, we welcome your help. Suggesting Invisible Women as a group’s next read, sharing your examples of data bias in your life/workplace/community, raising the topic of data bias at forums and groups that you participate in, and mailing information to local officials in your community are among the ways you could help grow this grass-root effort! And you can join us and work together to get things done!

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Help us get COUNTED, 2!!