While progress has been made to reduce discrimination against women and girls, gender inequality remains a persistent challenge around the world.
Women are still denied basic rights and opportunities in many parts of society. To make matters worse, most data about their experiences also remains uncollected. This failure leads to significant data gaps that undermine efforts to promote gender equality.
The GovLab’s The 100 Questions Initiative aims to address these kinds of gaps by sourcing important questions that—if answered using new data sources and data science—could transform the way we address gender-related issues in the 21st century. Together with Data2X, we have spent the last year tapping into the wisdom of gender “bilinguals”—individuals with expertise in both gender issues and data science. By building upon The GovLab’s smarter crowdsourcing methodology, the cohort of gender bilinguals produced a key set of expert-validated questions that address the most pressing problems that women and girls face.
Now we need your input. Through our website’s online voting platform at gender.the100questions.org, we ask you to select the question(s) you believe merit further research. A summary of these top 10 questions is also provided below (Fuller descriptions along with the rationale for why these questions matter can be found here.). Through public voting, we can establish a global agenda for using data to help answer key gender questions through the creation of purpose-driven data collaboratives.
The Top 10 Gender Questions:
Question #1: How can economic systems account for women’s disproportionate participation in unpaid, domestic care work?
Question #2: What enables and predicts decision-making that meaningfully promotes gender equality laws and policies?
Question #3: How does climate change impact women and girls and exacerbate underlying vulnerabilities?
Question #4: What is the rate of sexual and gender-based violence and what are the most effective interventions to prevent and respond to violence?
Question #5: How can governments and institutions better understand factors contributing to the disparate rates of poverty between men and women, and assess strategies for mitigating them, such as increasing access to capital?
Question #6: What are the gender gaps in ICT access and skills in developed and developing countries and how do these gaps impact women’s economic and social empowerment?
Question #7: How can we measure the prevalence and consequences of harassment during transportation and while working?
Question #8: What impact does diversity, increased representation of women and their influence on decision making bodies have on policy outcomes?
Questions #9: What are the impacts of shifting gender norms on women’s and men’s perceptions, livelihoods, and ability to work?
Question #10: What gender identity stereotypes are introduced to children in early-age education and how?
Share your input on which of these 10 questions should be prioritized for future research and action through our online voting platform at gender.the100questions.org.