A Leap Towards Equitable Future: Empowering Women in Data-Driven Decision Making 

While navigating through a world increasingly reliant on data-driven decision-making, it’s imperative to pause and reflect on the underlying questions: How accurately do the available data reflect the diversity of our society? Are women’s voices adequately represented within the datasets that are driving predictive models and influencing decisions? Women’s preferences, perspectives, and behaviors are integral components of societal dynamics, yet their visibility within datasets often remains limited. Without comprehensive insight into women’s realities, the predictive models and algorithms guiding decision-making processes may unknowingly perpetuate biases and reinforce existing inequalities.

In her book “Invisible Women ” published in 2019, Caroline Criado Perez has shown through deep objective analysis, how society has always assumed men to be the default for humans, and the consequent impact on various aspects of life. The book reports how data about female bodies has been conspicuously absent in medical research. This absence has left a critical gap in our understanding of how drugs and treatments affect women differently from men. Consequently, women may be at a higher risk of experiencing adverse effects due to medications that were primarily tested on male subjects.

Moreover, the absence of gender-specific data lies beyond healthcare, extending to perceptions, decisions, and policies that shape societal norms and structures. From urban planning to transportation design, the inadequate representation of women’s experiences and needs has resulted in unintentional but significant consequences for women’s lives.

The persisting Gender Gap in Digital Data:

In this age of data science, it’s also imperative to take a deeper look at the digital data to understand the gender gap. The internet today is the most important platform for information dissemination and knowledge acquisition, and increasingly smartphones are providing the gateway to it. However, beneath the surface lies a stark reality of unequal access, particularly among women. Let’s start by taking a look at the internet access data worldwide. Statistics reveal that as of January 2023, around the world 63.5% of women had access to the internet, while the share of men having access was 68.8%.  The divide varies across countries, localities and culture. In India, the gap is significantly wider. According to the Mobile Gender Gap Report 2023, compiled by global not-for-profit telecom body GSMA, the gender gap in mobile internet usage in India stood at around 40 per cent in 2022, as against 41 per cent in 2021.  If we further look at the urban – rural divide, in 2021 only 33.33% urban and 24.6% of rural women of India had access to the internet, while the corresponding numbers for Indian men were 72.5% and 48.7% respectively. The lower access not only leads to lower representation of women in the digital data, but also more content that is biased against women, thereby ending up in a vicious cycle that forces many women to stay away from internet use.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that UNESCO’s report highlights how modern AI systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on web data, unknowingly preserve systemic prejudices. The affects of this digital gender gap extend far beyond mere access to online platforms. It influences socio-economic opportunities, educational attainment, and ultimately, perpetuates gender inequalities in various spheres of life.

Ensuring equitable access to digital resources and promoting gender-inclusive content creation are critical steps toward fostering a more inclusive digital landscape. It’s time to bridge the digital gender gap and pave the way for a more equitable and inclusive digital future.

Closing the Gender Gap by Amplifying Women’s Voices:

The question that looms large now is what can be done to change it. One cannot obviously deny the use of data-driven intelligence. The only way to therefore break the bias is to challenge the gender norms that exist in all spheres. Right from mindful creation of digital data to working on mathematical models and algorithms for detecting bias and eliminating them, there is plenty to be done by the women for the women.

Currently, only about 24% of professionals in the field of data science are women. The industry is on the lookout for more women to join in different roles like data architects and administrators, business and socio-economic data analysts, data analytics managers along side in the roles of regulators and policy-makers. While some of these roles require expertise in mathematics, statistics and computing, there are also roles that depend more on the domain expertise and a flair for working with computational tools rather than core algorithms.  There are many on-line and off-line courses to pursue a career in the realm of data analysis and related science.

As organizations all over recognize that without wider participation of women in the data science arena, it would not be possible to architect an inclusive, empathetic world, it is time for women to take it upon themselves to rewrite their own history through their own data footprints, and not from its absence.

Useful resources:

• The Association of Computing Machinery(ACM) is an organization that serves professionals, researchers, and students of computing, data, and technology worldwide. For students, this association offers seminars, guidance, and courses and for professionals, they facilitate network building, job creation, and connecting with the right resources.
• Online courses on Data Analytic and related science:
• https://www.upgrad.com/bootcamps/job-linked-data-science-advanced-bootcamp/
• https://excelr.in/data_science_course_kolkata/
• https://www.coursera.org/courses
• https://www.udemy.com/topic/data-analysis/
• https://www.upgrad.com/data-science-course/
• https://grow.google/intl/en_in/data-analytics-course/

-Author, Dr. Lipika Dey, Professor, Ashoka University