Beyond data: the power of listening

Numbers don’t tell the whole story

Their experiences are also more complex than numbers alone can describe. In Bangladesh, numbers showed that women in refugee camps couldn’t leave the house during COVID-19. It would have been easy to assume that was because women were afraid of catching COVID.

But when we asked women, they said that men in their lives believed the pandemic was caused by women having more freedoms, and the way to end COVID was to roll back women’s rights.

Numbers alone never would have revealed the underlying problem, much less pointed to a solution. If we depend on numbers alone, at best, we would have come up with actions that overlooked the underlying challenge—a social norm that blames and polices women. At worst, we would have made the problem worse by proposing solutions that increased the risk of violence to women and girls.

If we want to help people solve the problems they are facing—and that the world is facing—we need to listen. We need to invest in helping them solve their own problems. Because with resources and support, women come up with incredible solutions.

In Niger, women found ways to share COVID-19 information in minority-language communities so no one had to go without the information to protect themselves. In Uganda, women organized to change the way the UN does food distribution so that it was safer and easier for women to get food.

Understanding data, putting it to work

We have a lot of faith in numbers and debate them vigorously. We talk about why you need to count different people (you really do—especially women and girls). We’ve spent more than a decade talking about how big data will change the world. Left alone, that is not going to be enough to solve global problems. What will be enough?

• We need better data. In the data we currently have, many people are invisible. Looking at online behavior? 52% of women in the world don’t use the internet, so they aren’t in the data (that’s 243 million fewer women than men online). In 2013, ZERO humanitarian responses were collecting data about women’s needs in order to plan a better response. Most global data on food doesn’t provide specific data on women. We need better ways to listen to women directly.
• We need to act on data. Collecting data is a good step, but we need to feed that data into decisions. While many groups collect data about women and girls, and a few collect data about other historically marginalized groups, upcoming research shows that most people don’t use the data they collect. So they’ve taken the time of refugees, people in crisis, and people who have no time to spare, and then they leave that data to collect dust in spreadsheets without ever analyzing that data or using it to make better decisions.
• Get data and resources to people who solve problems. Putting data, and more importantly, resources and authority, in the hands of the people closest to the problem is the most important step we can take. Far too few resources go to women, and women are dramatically underrepresented when it comes time to make decisions. But when they have resources and a seat at the table, women come up with incredible solutions to problems.