BACKGROUND

Gender and open data efforts are often siloed. Locally and nationally, there are women’s groups, digital rights groups, and gender experts, but rarely do they cross-collaborate.

While global initiatives and partnerships have been established, they have yet to integrate vertically and horizontally. Furthermore, the open government data movement still has a long way to go. Women are less likely to be online than men; less likely to be consulted on the design of data policies and initiatives; under-represented among the ranks of data scientists; and often uncounted in official statistics.

The gender and open data intersection can be used to open up a conversation on the current state of government data, and how it can be improved. Ultimately, women should use open data to empower themselves.

Open data must be used to support women and their needs as well as address the role governments play to support these efforts with data and create better citizen-state engagement.

This is about data equity : data that everyone can access and use. But how do we get there?