Bridging the Divide: How Citizen Science Can Help Narrow the Gender Data Gap
Written By Chisato Kimura and Alyson Marks
Source: Alice Donovan Rouse/ Unsplash
While the COVID-19 pandemic has affected billions of people around the world, women and girls, as well as transgender people, have faced the brunt of its impact. According to a recent UN Women report, From Insights to Action: Gender Equality in the Wake of COVID-19, more than 47 million women and girls will be pushed into poverty by early this year, infection rates among female healthcare workers are three times higher than their male counterparts, and reports of violence against women have risen around the world. These issues are especially acute in low-income countries. And further exacerbating these stark statistics, is the continued lack of sex-disaggregated data on the pandemic, which many countries are still struggling to provide. This data is essential for understanding COVID-19’s impact on women and girls and implementing effective policies that are targeted towards their needs.
As National Statistics Offices (NSOs) continue to grapple with the pandemic’s significant burden, many are tapping into non-traditional sources to help fill these gaps. Citizen science, which we know are already contributing to or could contribute to the monitoring of more than 30% of the SDG indicators, has the potential to help fill many of these acute gender data gaps, yet it remains largely untapped.
Based on our research, we found several advantages for expanding the use of citizen science to help fill gender data gaps. First, it would foster greater participation by women and transgender people in data collection efforts by enabling them to self-report positive COVID-19 tests, living conditions, or even instances of violence against them. This would likely provide a more accurate reflection of their experiences. Fortunately, there are already some citizen science initiatives available geared toward these groups, such as Safecity, which crowdsources anonymous reports of sexual violence (often by women) and identifies violent hotspots and patterns in communities to create safer spaces and inform citizens, researchers, and policymakers. Another initiative, B-SAFE (Bio-Specimen Assessment of Fire Effects), uses citizen science to gather information on how wildfires affect the health of pregnant women and their babies by enabling women to self-report symptoms. However, gender-focused citizen science initiatives are few and far between, and more are clearly needed to help fill data gaps.
Second, citizen science could be used to gather more gender data in remote or rural locations where traditional data sources often fall short. For example, after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, in rural and hard-to-reach areas in Japan, local communities and citizen networks, including anti-nuclear activists, farmers, evacuees, and others measured radiation levels in the air, food, and soil to help inform the public about the safety of their environments. Whereas, in Central India, a rural area known for high fluoride levels, students and local women worked to measure fluoride levels in the local drinking water to determine if it was safe for consumption.
Third, where timeliness is an issue, citizen science could be used to provide more timely gender data. For instance, via the Global Forest Watch initiative, volunteers can monitor and report on deforestation and fires in near real-time.
Fourth, for countries that may not have the funding or infrastructure in place to monitor many of the SDG indicators related specifically to gender, using citizen science approaches could be a potential solution. For example, TReNDS’ members Dilek Fraisl and Jillian Campbell are currently working with the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), IIASA, the UN Environment Programme, the Ocean Conservancy - International Coastal Cleanup (ICC), and others to pilot the results of a recent systematic review mapping citizen science contributions to the SDGs in Ghana. In particular, the project team is working to use citizen science approaches in Ghana to monitor SDG indicator 14.1.1b on marine litter, a priority identified by the GSS. Additionally, PARIS21 is working with the Philippine Statistics Authority to use citizen-generated data for official SDG reporting to help fill data gaps. As part of this work, PARIS21 has provided suggested criteria to validate citizen-generated data and recommendations for effectively advancing its use moving forward. The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data also offers useful guidance on leveraging citizen science for SDG reporting.
Citizen science could also be used to help countries develop a better understanding of the major gender issues. For instance, Litter Intelligence, a citizen science initiative launched in 2018 in partnership with Sustainable Coastlines, New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment’s Waste Minimisation Fund, Statistics New Zealand and the Department of Conservation, serves as New Zealand’s first national litter database. The initiative engages more than 6,000 individuals in communities around Aotearoa to collect high-quality data on litter via training, equipment, and technology. The insights from the data are being used to garner a better understanding of the issue, as well as help researchers measure the effectiveness of litter-reduction interventions and other proposed solutions.
Lastly, harnessing citizen science to help gather gender data will not only be pivotal for more effective data collection, but it can be used as an educational and advocacy tool to build global awareness of gender disparities and empower women and transgender people in communities around the world. For instance, citizen science is already being used in college engineering curriculums to bolster students’ learning experiences and to foster advocacy efforts around conservation in India.
Having accurate and timely gender data is critical to developing effective policies and programs to ensure that no one is left behind. And as demonstrated, citizen science has great potential to help fill these acute gender data gaps. This International Women’s Day, we should work to increase the number of citizen science initiatives targeted towards women and girls and encourage more research that demonstrates the value of citizen science for mitigating gender data gaps.