Count Women So Women Count

When will you start caring about data? About the importance of sex-disaggregated data? When will you start caring about the way in which we are already replacing data on sex with data on gender identity? When will you realise that it matters? That counting women matters or else they quite literally don’t count.

Maybe you will start caring when the newspapers report that there is an apparent explosion in ‘female’ sexual offending rates. Because it won’t take many transwomen being convicted of sexual offences to double or triple the offending rate.

Maybe you will start caring when the government or criminal justice agencies reallocate precious resources away from sexual offending programmes for men to fund programmes for all these new ‘female’ sexual offenders.

Maybe you will start caring when a man who commits a sexual offence against a woman you care about and love slips through the net because the sexual offending programme for men has been cut back…to tackle the growing phenomenon of ‘female’ sexual offending.

Maybe you will start caring when your employer announces proudly that their ‘gender pay gap’ is closing, even though – in your heavily male-dominated tech company – you know that’s only because two transwomen are now regarded as female for the purposes of the company’s annual gender pay gap report.

Maybe you’ll start caring because your employer tells you there isn’t really a problem with female employees being underpaid for work of the same value because the stats now say something different.

Maybe you’ll start caring when the prevalence rates for a disease that disproportionately affects young women starts to decline because the census and health authorities have enabled people to answer the sex question based on their gender identity not their sex.

Maybe you’ll start caring when a young woman you know and love struggles to secure the health care she needs because the local NHS authority has cut funding for the screening programme for that disease based on the declining prevalence rate.

When will you start caring about the loss of this data, which is already happening?

You’ve read Caroline Criado-Perez’s book, right?

WAKE UP! #countwomensowomencount

Love, a Data Nerd