Feed aggregator

Turkey has promised to deliver 30,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to Sarajevo, announced President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who on Tuesday received Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency members in Ankara. Turkey’s president also stressed that one of Turkey’s aims is...

Eight participants have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Olympic-Qualifying Budapest World Cup Sabre, which was the first international fencing event after an almost year-long hiatus, Telex reported via 444.hu. Team members including participants, referees, doctors and VIP guests could...

L'Ile-de-France sera-t-elle confinée le week-end, comme l'a clairement laissé entendre Jean Castex mardi ? Emmanuel Macron doit trancher mercredi face à la "troisième vague" de l'épidémie et une vaccination freinée par les doutes sur AstraZeneca.

Poland’s development, labour and technology ministry has planned two video conferences this week to speak to representatives of the events and gastronomy industries about the sector’s demands,  Deputy Minister Olga Semeniuk announced on Tuesday. The deputy minister emphasised that the...

After Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová met with Prime Minister Igor Matovič on Tuesday to ask what steps he intends to take towards ending Slovakia’s current coalition crisis, which has been ongoing for three weeks, the PM offered little insight into how...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday (17 March) that China was acting aggressively and repressively, citing its actions in the East and South China Seas where it has territorial disputes with Japan and other Asian nations.

Enyhén javult a járványhelyzet, nincs szükség kemény lockdownra. Szerdán valószínűleg további 40 nappal hosszabbítja meg a kormány a veszélyhelyzetet. Az államfő rászólt a kormányfőre, hogy vessen véget a kormányválságnak. A valószínűleg megrendült idegállapotú, hallgatag miniszterelnök különféle kézjeleket mutogatott az az elnöki palotában a fényképezkedés során. Richard Sulík is találkozott Zuzana Čaputovával, és elismételte: ha Matovič nem szedi a sátorfáját, az SaS kilép a kormányból.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has vetoed a bill decriminalising euthanasia on the grounds that it is unconstitutional two hours after the Constitutional Court announced that it had declared the bill, under which the request to obtain a medically...

L’ancien club de Youcef Belaïli, Al-Ahli SC en l’occurrence, n’en a visiblement pas fini avec le joueur, et pour cause, l’ailier gauche international algérien aurait perdu plus de 1,6 million d’euros (1, 04 milliard FCFA) pour pouvoir régulariser sa situation. En effet, c’est ce qu’a rapporté le quotidien arabophone Ennahar. L’ailier gauche international algérien, Youcef Belaïli, […]

L’article Algérie : Youcef Belaïli perd plus d’un milliard ! est apparu en premier sur Afrik.com.

The €2.9 billion Finland will receive from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility will be divided between three sectors with 50% of the funding going to enhancing the green transition, and the remaining funds divided between digitalisation and research and...

Ahead of his St. Patrick’s Day meeting with US President Joe Biden, Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington, highlighting the work of the government’s Shared Island initiative, and the need to achieve reconciliation in Northern...

Cinq ans après avoir signé avec l’Union européenne un accord controversé ayant permis de réduire considérablement le passage de migrants vers l’Europe, la Turquie appelle désormais à renouveler ce pacte devenu caduc à ses yeux. Le vice-ministre turc des Affaires...

More than fifty restaurant owners from Wallonia and Brussels are taking the Belgian state to court to be allowed to reopen. The catering industry has been closed since October to combat the spread of the coronavirus, but there is no...

New Democracy MEP (EPP) Stelios Kympouropoulos has triggered a wave of reactions after he voted against abortion in a European Parliament resolution. He voted for an amendment saying, “every human being has the inherent right to life and that the...

Le document, qui remplacera le titre actuel en circulation depuis 1995, sera déployé progressivement dès les prochains jours dans des départements "pilotes" - Oise, Seine-Maritime et Réunion - avant d'être généralisé à toute la France à compter du 2 août.

Pexels /Artikel auf Deutsch lesen/ Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES)

By Anja Papenfuss
BERLIN, Mar 17 2021 (IPS)

Women get freezing cold in trains and in big city offices because the air conditioning is set for men’s sensitivity to the cold. They spend the whole theatre interval (when visits to the theatre were still possible) in the queue because there are too few toilets.

What may appear to be more of a nuisance – a lack of public toilets for women – is a life-threatening problem in many countries in the world. In some federal states in India, women have no access to toilets and fritter away valuable time looking for a safe place. If they don’t find it, they are often sexually harassed or even killed.

City authorities don’t record these special needs, and they are therefore not taken into account. But the problem is broader. In a large number of areas, data is not collected by gender. That’s true for example in medical research, which is mostly geared towards men for convenience’s sake.

It’s also true in traffic planning, giving preference to cars that are overwhelmingly used by men, although the majority of women globally travel by foot or by bicycle. In winter, it’s first the streets that are cleared although most accidents take place on pavements.

In her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, the British author and feminist Caroline Criado-Perez has collected such facts and data from all areas of life, cultures and parts of the earth on just 500 pages.

Anja Papenfuss

Criado-Perez shows the huge gaps in data to the detriment of women in the workplace, in the design of basic commodities, in medicine and in public life. The ubiquitous discrimination of women is underscored with sobering figures.

And they prove what we have only presumed up until now: the world is not only partly but almost exclusively geared to men’s needs. She calls it ‘one-size-fits men’.

When data bias becomes life-threatening

The fact that the data gaps are so grave is also because we live in the digital age. Data is the new gold. With data, people can earn a lot of money and some base far-reaching decisions on it every day. That’s why it makes a huge difference whether data is taken from men or from women for an algorithm and with which data artificial intelligence is fed.

Criado-Perez comes up with the example of job-related assessment tests: Men always got the job if applications were only evaluated by artificial intelligence because both the questions and the answers referred to male views of life.

Another example: when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra introduced an anonymous musical test, the number of female musicians rose from 0 to 45 per cent. The same phenomenon can be observed in the evaluation process for scientific essays: If neither authors nor evaluators are known, then more essays come in from female academics and receive a higher mark.

If there’s a will, there’s a rather simple way: it doesn’t cost more money to collect data from women and about women to include them in the decision-making.

In the health sector too, women are mostly overlooked. For example, they are often given the wrong treatment when they have a heart attack because they often show ‘untypical’, i.e. non-male symptoms. Women are 17 per cent more likely to die in a car accident than men. Why?

Because it’s almost exclusively male dolls that are used in crash tests. Agricultural equipment and machines are only designed for men. Men are usually taller, have bigger hands and more strength.

Women, who use equipment or machines that are not suited for them on a daily basis, have health problems and are more likely to have accidents. Men are the measurement for all things. Or why, for an evening meal, are the costs for the food and the hotel allowed as expenses but the travel and babysitting costs are not? Criado-Perez has collected a huge number of similar examples.

A few successes

The good news is that this can be changed. If there’s a will, there’s a rather simple way: it doesn’t cost more money to collect data from women and about women to include them in the decision-making.

It doesn’t cost more money to take female instead of male test subjects for research. In many areas it would make economic sense to take women more into account. If infrastructure and research are geared more towards women, this does not only lead to women being treated equally but also leads to cost savings. As cost savings are highly valued in our capitalist world, this transition becomes more likely.

But for this to happen, many voices need to come together and demand the ‘gender data gap’ to be closed. Perhaps that includes those men who have read the entertainingly written book and have been persuaded that their view of the world is not the only right one.

The author has even had a few (rather symbolic) successes: Thanks to her perseverance, an image of Jane Austen can now be found on the British 10 pound note. Alongside the image of the Queen, she is the only woman on a British note. It’s also down to Criado-Perez that the statue of a female lawyer stands on Parliament Square in London next to many hundreds of male statues.

*Anja Papenfuss was previously head of FES’s Press Department, and before that, she worked as a policy officer in its political analysis unit. She edited the German-language sister magazine, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft. She studied political science in Bonn and Berlin.

Source: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), Berlin

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

The post Failing to Collect Data About Women is no Trivial Offence appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer is Global Editor in the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's Communications Department*

The post Failing to Collect Data About Women is no Trivial Offence appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Ce mercredi, les éléments des forces de défense et de sécurité congolaises iront aux urnes, avant le reste de la population. Une première dans ce pays où la chose n’est pas bien perçue par l’opposition. Dans le cadre de l’élection présidentielle prévue pour le dimanche 21 mars 2021 au Congo-Brazzaville, les hommes en uniforme doivent […]

L’article Présidentielle au Congo : les militaires votent ce mercredi est apparu en premier sur Afrik.com.

Être vacciné, avoir un test PCR ou une preuve qu'une personne a guéri du COVID-19 seront les trois éléments clés du certificat vert numérique de l'UE qui doit être présenté aujourd'hui par la Commission européenne, selon des sources.

MTI: Röviddel hét óra előtt az eurót 367,51 forinton jegyezték a kedd esti 367,40 forint után. A svájci frank árfolyama 333,50 forintról 333,57 forintra nőtt, a dolláré pedig 308,56 forintról 308,81 forintra emelkedett. Az euró 1,1900 dolláron állt reggel a kedd esti 1,1909 dollár után.