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The promise and perils of big gender data

Nature Medicine volume 26, pages 17–18 (2020)Cite this article

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Big Data may revolutionize social science—and also amplify our deepest cultural biases.

Women and girls are legally and socially marginalized in many countries. As a result, policymakers neglect key gendered issues such as informal labor markets, domestic violence, and mental health1. The scientific community can help push such topics onto policy agendas, but science itself is riven by inequality: women are underrepresented in academia, and gendered research is rarely a priority of funding agencies.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Data2x, United Nations Foundation, Washington, DC, USA

    Bapu Vaitla, Rebecca Furst-Nichols & Emily Courey Pryor

  2. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA

    Bapu Vaitla

  3. The GovLab, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, Brooklyn, NY, USA

    Stefaan Verhulst

  4. Flowminder Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden

    Linus Bengtsson & Marta C. González

  5. Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California–Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Marta C. González

Authors
  1. Bapu Vaitla
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  2. Stefaan Verhulst
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  3. Linus Bengtsson
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  4. Marta C. González
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  5. Rebecca Furst-Nichols
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  6. Emily Courey Pryor
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Emily Courey Pryor.

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Vaitla, B., Verhulst, S., Bengtsson, L. et al. The promise and perils of big gender data. Nat Med 26, 17–18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0712-z

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