4. what dangers exist when categorize people according to a binary
Principle: Rethink Binaries and Hierarchies
Data feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, forth with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression.
"Sign in or create an account to continue." At a time in which every website seems to require its ain user account, these words often arm-twist a groan—and the inevitability of yet another password that volition presently be forgotten. But for people like Maria Munir, the British college educatee who famously came out as nonbinary to and then president Barack Obama on live Tv set, the prospect of creating a new user account is more than mere annoyance.Guardian, Apr 24, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/24/now-or-never-says-pupil-who-came-out-as-non-binary-to-obama. Munir, who has since graduated, is now an activist, writer, and public speaker. Their website is https://mariamunir.com.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">1 Websites that require information nigh gender as office of their account registration process almost always only provide a binary choice: "male or female."For the millions of nonbinary people in the world—that is, people who are not either male person or female, men or women—the seemingly simple asking to "select gender" can be difficult to answer, if it can be answered at all.transgender populations. However, these studies sampled only transgender populations and did not capture not-binary individuals who practice not identify as transgender." The Williams Found has asserted that 0.3 per centum of US adults are transgender. Only this figure is probable an underestimate, both for the reasons described by the APA and for the additional personal reasons that might touch an individual's conclusion to cocky-disembalm. Meet Mona Chalabi, "Why We Don't Know the Size of the Transgender Population," FiveThirtyEight, July 29, 2014, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-nosotros-dont-know-the-size-of-the-transgender-population/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">4 All the same when creating an online user account, non to mention applying for a national passport, the pick between "male" or "female," and just "male" or "female," is most ever the only one.5 These options (or the lack thereof) have consequences, as Munir clearly states: "If you refuse to register non-binary people like me with birth certificates, and exclude united states in everything from creating bank accounts to signing up for mailing lists, you practice not accept the right to turn around and say that there are not enough of us to warrant modify."6"What gets counted counts," feminist geographer Joni Seager has asserted, and Munir is 1 person who understands that.https://borough.mit.edu/2016/03/22/missing-women-blank-maps-and-data-voids-what-gets-counted-counts/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">7 What is counted—like being a man or a adult female—oftentimes becomes the ground for policymaking and resource allocation. By contrast, what is non counted—like existence nonbinary—becomes invisible (although in that location are also good reasons for being invisible in some contexts, and we'll come back to those shortly). Seager'due south research focus is gender, the environment, and policy (come across figure 4.1), and she points out that at that place is more global information on gender being collected than ever before. And yet, these data drove efforts often however get out many people out, including nonbinary people, lesbians, and older women. Even amid those who are counted, they tend to exist asked very narrow questions about their lives. "Women in poor countries seem to exist asked about vi times a mean solar day what kind of contraception they use," Seager quipped in a lecture at the Boston Public Library. "But they are non asked virtually whether they have access to abortion. They are not asked about what sports they like to play."" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">8The procedure of converting qualitative feel into data can be empowering, and even has the potential to be healing, equally we address toward the finish of this chapter. When thoughtfully collected, quantitative data tin can exist empowering too. So many issues of structural inequality are issues of scale, and they tin seem anecdotal until they are viewed as a whole. For instance, in 2014, when film professors Shelley Cobb and Linda Ruth Williams set out to count the women involved in the picture show industry in the United Kingdom, they encountered a woman screenwriter who had never before considered the fact that in the United Kingdom, women screenwriters are outnumbered by screenwriters of other genders at a rate of four to ane.Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 107–132.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">9 She expressed surprise: "I didn't even know that because screenwriters never get to come across each other."Feminist Media Histories iii, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 108." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">10A similar situation occurred in the example of ProPublica's reporting on maternal mortality in the U.s., as discussed in affiliate 1. The investigative team set out to count all the mothers who had died in childbirth or from complications shortly thereafter. They interviewed many families of women who had died while giving nascence, just, similar the screenwriter, few of the families were enlightened that the phenomenon extended beyond their own daughters and sisters, partners and friends. This lack of data, like the issue of maternal mortality itself, is another structural problem, and it serves as an example of why feminist sociologists like Ann Oakley have long advocated for the apply of quantitative methods alongside qualitative ones. Without quantitative research, Oakley explains, "it is hard to distinguish between personal experience and commonage oppression."International Journal of Social Enquiry Methodology 2, no. 3 (1999): 247–254.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">xiBut before commonage oppression tin can be identified through analyses like the one that ProPublica conducted, the data must exist in the first identify. Which brings us back to Maria Munir and the importance of collecting data that reflects the population information technology purports to represent. On this effect, Facebook was ahead of the curve when, in 2014, it expanded the gender categories available to registered users from the standard two to over fifty choices, ranging from "Genderqueer" to "Neither"—a move that was widely praised by a range of LGBTQ+ advocacy groups (effigy 4.2a).Slate, February thirteen, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/13/facebook_custom_gender_options_here_are_all_56_custom_options.html.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">12 One year later, when the company abased its select-from-options model altogether, replacing the "Gender" dropdown carte with a blank text field, the determination was touted equally fifty-fifty more progressive (effigy four.2b).New Media and Society 19, no. 6 (2017): 880–898." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">thirteen Because Facebook users could input any word or phrase to betoken their gender, they were at last unconstrained by the assumptions imposed past any preset choice.14Figure 4.1: Motherhood and paternity leave effectually the globe from The Women's Atlas, fifth edition (2018). Joni Seager and Annie Olson started working on the first women'south atlas in 1980, when there was very little global information on women. The book is now in its 5th edition, only Seager highlights that in that location are still huge gender data gaps. Image courtesy of Joni Seager and Penguin Books.
Just additional research by information studies scholar Rena Bivens has shown that beneath the surface, Facebook continues to resolve users' genders into a binary: either "male" or "female person."" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">15 Apparently, this conclusion was made so that Facebook could allow its primary clients—advertisers—to more than easily market to one gender or the other. Put another style, fifty-fifty if y'all tin cull the gender that you show to your Facebook friends, you can't change the gender that Facebook provides to its paying customers (figure 4.3). And this discrepancy leads right back to the problems of ability we've been discussing since the outset of this book: it's corporations similar Facebook, and not individuals like Maria Munir, who take the ability to control the terms of data collection. This remains true even as it is people like Munir who have personally (and often painfully) run up against the limits of those classification systems—and who best know how they could be improved, remade, or in some cases, abolished altogether.
Feminists have spent a lot of time thinking nigh classification systems because the criteria by which people are divided into the categories of human being and adult female is exactly that: a nomenclature system.Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">16 And while the gender binary is one of the most widespread nomenclature systems in the world today, information technology is no less synthetic than the Facebook advertising platform or, say, the Golden Gate Span. The Aureate Gate Span is a physical structure; Facebook ads are a virtual structure; and the gender binary is a conceptual one. Merely all these structures were created by people: people living in a particular identify, at a particular time, and who were influenced—as we all are—by the world around them.17Many twentieth-century feminist scholars attempted to address the social structure of gender past treating gender as something separate from sex. Merely that distinction is increasingly breaking down. Both gender and sex are social constructs, every bit it turns out. Fifty-fifty sex, which today is sometimes however considered in biologically essential terms, has a distinct cultural history. It tin exist traced to a place (Europe) and a time (the Enlightenment) when new theories nigh commonwealth and what philosophers chosen "natural rights" began to sally. Before then, there was a hierarchy of the sexes, with men on the elevation and women on the lesser. (Cheers, Aristotle!
Effigy 4.ii: (a) Facebook's initial attempt to allow users to indicate additional genders, circa 2014. Epitome courtesy of Slate. (b) Facebook's updated gender field, circa 2018. Screenshot by Lauren F. Klein.
Effigy 4.3: Detailed view of Facebook'due south new account creation page, circa 2018. Annotation that you withal accept to choose "Female" or "Male"—a binary choice—when you sign upwardly. Screenshot past Lauren F. Klein.
For the idea of a sexual practice binary to gain force, it would take figures like Thomas Jefferson declaring that all men were created equal, and entire countries like the United States to exist founded on that principle. Once that happened, political leaders began to worry near what, exactly, they had alleged: to whom did the principle of equality apply? All sorts of systems for classifying people accept their roots in that era—non only sex just also, crucially, race." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">20 Before the eighteenth century, Western societies understood race as a concept tied to religious affiliation, geographic origin, or some combination of both. Race had very little to exercise with pare color until the rise of the transatlantic slave merchandise, in the seventeenth century.21 And even then, race was still a hazy concept. Information technology would have the scientific racism of the mid-eighteenth century for race to begin to be defined by Western societies in terms of black and white.
Have Carl Linnaeus, for case, and the revolutionary classification organisation that he is credited with creating.22 Linnaeus's system of binomial classification is the 1 that scientists still use to today to allocate humans and all other living things. Simply Linnaeus'due south system didn't just include the category of human being sapiens, as it turns out. It also incorrectly—but equally historians would tell yous, unsurprisingly—included five subcategories of humans separated by race. (Ane of these five was set aside for mythological humans who didn't exist in existent life, in example you're still prepare to become behind his science.) But Linnaeus'due south nomenclature organization wasn't even the worst of the lot. Over the grade of the eighteenth century, increasingly racist systems of classification began to emerge, along with pseudosciences like comparative anatomy and physiognomy. These allowed elite white men to provide a purportedly scientific basis for the differential treatment of people of colour, women, disabled people, and gay people, amid other groups. Although those fields have long since been discredited, their legacy is still visible in instances as far-ranging as the maternal health outcomes that nosotros've already discussed, to the divergent rates of car insurance that are offered to Black vs. white drivers, every bit described in an investigation conducted by ProPublica and Consumer Reports.
A uncomplicated solution might be to say, "Fine, then. Let's only not classify anything or anyone!" But the flaw in that plan is that information must be classified in some way to be put to use. In fact, by the fourth dimension that information becomes data, information technology'due south already been classified in some way. Information, afterward all, is information made tractable, to infringe a term from information science. "What distinguishes data from other forms of information is that it can be processed by a computer, or by computer-like operations," equally Lauren has written in an essay coauthored with information studies scholar Miriam Posner.
Classification systems are essential to whatsoever working infrastructure, every bit information theorists Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have argued in their influential book Sorting Things Out.26 This is true not only for computational infrastructures and conceptual ones, simply also for physical infrastructures similar the checkout line at the grocery store. Think about how angry a shopper tin can get when they're stuck in the express line behind someone with more than the designated fifteen items or less. Or, closer to habitation, call up of the system you utilize (or should use) to sort your wearing apparel for the wash. It's non that nosotros should reject these classification systems out of hand, or even that we could if we wanted to. (We're pretty sure that no one wants all their socks to turn pink.) Information technology'southward just that once a system is in place, it becomes naturalized equally "the way things are." This ways we don't question how our classification systems are constructed, what values or judgments might exist encoded into them, or why they were thought up in the first place. In fact—and this is another point made by Bowker and Star—we ofttimes forget to enquire these questions until our systems become objects of contention, or completely break down.
Bowker and Star give the example of the public debates that took place in the 1990s effectually the categories of race employed on the United states of america Federal Census. At event was whether people should exist able to choose multiple races on the census form. Multiracial people and their families were some of the master proponents of the option, who saw it as a way to recognize their multiple identities rather than forcing them to squeeze themselves into a single, inadequate box. Those opposed included the Congressional Black Caucus likewise equally some Black and Latinx civil rights groups that saw the option as potentially reducing their representative vocalization.Journal of Government Information 27, no. 2 (March 2000): 129–156.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">27 Ultimately, the 2000 census did let people to cull multiple races, and millions of people took advantage of it. Just the debates around that single category illustrate how classification gets complicated chop-chop, and with a range of personal and political stakes.https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-timeline/." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">28Classification systems also carry meaning fabric consequences, and the U.s.a. Demography provides an additional example of that. Demography counts are used to draw voting districts, make policy decisions, and allocate billions of dollars in federal resources. The contempo Republican-led proposal to introduce a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census represents an attempt to wield this ability to very pointed political ends. Because undocumented immigrants know the risks, like deportation, that come with beingness counted, they are less probable to consummate the census questionnaire. Only because both political representation and federal funding are allocated according to the number and geographic areas of people counted in the census, undercounting undocumented immigrants (and the documented immigrants they often live with) ways less voting power—and fewer resources—accorded to those groups. This is a clear example of what we term the paradox of exposure: the double bind that places those who stand to significantly gain from being counted in the about danger from that aforementioned counting (or classifying) act.
In each of these cases, as is true of whatsoever instance of non fitting (or non wanting to fit) neatly into a box, it's of import to inquire whether it'south the categories that are inadequate, or whether—and this is a key feminist movement—it's the organisation of classification itself. Lurking under the surface of so many classification systems are faux binaries and implied hierarchies, such as the artificial distinctions between men and women, reason and emotion, nature and culture, and body and world. Decades of feminist thinking have taught us to question why these distinctions take come up about; what social, cultural, or political values they reverberate; what hidden (or not and so hidden) hierarchies they encode; and, crucially, whether they should exist in the starting time place.
Questioning Classification Systems
Let'south spend some time with an actual person who has started to question the classification systems that surround him: ane Michael Hicks, an eight-year-old Cub Scout from New Jersey. Why is Mikey, equally he'due south more unremarkably known, and so concerned about classification? Well, Mikey shares his name with someone who has been placed on a terrorist watch list past the The states federal government. As a result, Mikey has also been classified equally a potential terrorist and is subjected to the highest level of airport security screening every time that he travels. "A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don't catch him. Simply my 8-yr-old tin't walk through security without beingness frisked," his mother lamented to Lizette Alvarez, a reporter for the New York Times who covered the issue in 2010.
Of course, in some ways, Mikey is lucky. He is white, and so he does not run the risk of racial profiling—different, for instance, the many Blackness women who receive TSA pat-downs due to their natural hair.
Or, consider some other person with a history of bad experiences at the (literal) hands of the TSA. Sasha Costanza-Chock is nonbinary, similar Maria Munir. They are besides a blueprint professor at MIT, so they have a lot of experience both living with and thinking through oppressive nomenclature systems. In a 2018 essay, "Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination," they requite a physical example of why pattern justice is needed in relation to information.Journal of Design and Science, last updated July 26, 2018, https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/costanza-brimming.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">32 The essay describes how the seemingly simple system employed by the operators of those easily-in-the-air millimeter-wave aerodrome security scanning machines is in fact quite complex—and also fundamentally flawed.Few cisgender people are enlightened of the fact that earlier you step into a scanning machine, the TSA agent operating the motorcar looks you up and down, decides whether you are a man or a woman, and then pushes a button to select the corresponding gender on the scanner'due south touchscreen interface. That homo conclusion loads the algorithmic profile for either male bodies or female ones, confronting which your trunk's measurements are compared. If your measurements diverge from the statistical norm of that gender's body—whether the discrepancy is because yous're concealing a deadly weapon, considering your trunk doesn't fit neatly into either of the two categories that the system has provided, or because the TSA agent only made the wrong selection—you trigger a "risk warning." Then, in an act of what legal theorist Dean Spade terms authoritative violence, yous are subjected to the same total-body pat-down as a potential terrorist.
And so when we say that what gets counted counts, it's folks similar Sasha Costanza-Chock or Mikey Hicks or Maria Munir that we're thinking about. Because flawed classification systems—like the one that underlies the aerodrome scanner'southward take a chance-detection algorithm or the one that determines which names stop up on terrorist lookout man lists or but (simply!) the gender binary—are not only meaning bug in themselves, but also symptoms of a more global condition of inequality. The matrix of domination, which nosotros introduced in chapter 1, describes how race, gender, and grade (among other things) intersect to enhance opportunities for some people and constrain opportunities for others.biopower, also known as the distribution of life chances, which we reference in affiliate 2 in our analysis of redlining maps.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">34 Under the matrix of domination, normative bodies pass through scanners, borders, and bathrooms with ease; these systems take been designed by people like them, for people like them, with an aim—sometimes explicit—of keeping people not like them out.http://world wide web.ncsl.org/inquiry/education/-bathroom-bill-legislative-tracking635951130.aspx." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">35As these examples help to bear witness, the forces that operate through the matrix of domination are sneaky and lengthened. And they show upward everywhere—even in pockets on pants. A recent journalistic investigation of the size of pockets in eighty pairs of men's and women's jeans confirmed what women (and men and nonbinary people who habiliment women's jeans) have been maxim anecdotally for years: that their pants pockets merely aren't big enough (figure 4.4).Pudding, August 2018, https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">36 More specifically, the pockets of jeans designed for women are 48 percent shorter and 6.v pct narrower than the pockets of jeans designed for men. This size does matter! According to the same study, only xl percent of the forepart pockets of women's jeans can fit a smartphone, and less than half "tin can fit a wallet specifically designed to fit in front pockets." Hence the thriving market for women's handbags (to concord the same front-pocket wallet) and for replacement smartphone screens (for when your phone invariably falls out of your too-pocket-size pocket and cracks).Figure 4.4: From "Someone Clever Once Said Women Were Non Allowed Pockets," a comparative study of pockets in women'south and men'due south jeans by The Pudding (2018). Visualization by Jan Diehm and Bister Thomas for The Pudding.
Now, the designers of any particular pair of women'southward jeans are near certainly not thinking: "Permit's oppress women by making their pockets too small." They are probably just thinking about what looks nice. But what looks squeamish has a history likewise. Before the seventeenth century, "pockets" were external sacks on strings that could be tied in a higher place or below other garments. But starting in the 1600s, men's clothing began to feature internal pockets. Meanwhile, women'due south clothing became increasingly close-cut. By the belatedly eighteenth century, the women'southward pocket reached its breaking point, resulting in emergence of a new fashion item chosen a reticule, otherwise known every bit a purse. These tiny handbags were made out of cloth and, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum's helpful online history of pockets, could not hold very much.http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/history-of-pockets/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">37 And still, as the museum curators bespeak out, in an era in which virtually people shared all of their shelves and dressers, these reticules were 1 of the few places for women to store any items they wanted to keep to themselves. Fast forward to the present, and women (and people who wear women'due south fashion) must still carry their belongings outside of their clothes and on public brandish. They're also express in their power to use both of their hands at the same fourth dimension. It's (mostly) a minor annoyance, but it'southward 1 way among many that the patriarchy—a term that describes the combination of legal frameworks, social structures, and cultural values that contribute to the continued male domination of society—inadvertently and invisibly reproduces itself. In this case, it'southward pants—perhaps fifty-fifty the ones you're wearing correct at present—that compound and consolidate the patriarchy'south oppressive forcefulness.In addition to pants pockets, 1 of the other things that upholds the patriarchy is, equally it turns out, our ideas most gender itself. We've already asserted that gender is a social construct, but what does this phrase really mean? Queer theorist Judith Butler has long maintained that gender is best understood as a repeated performance, a prepare of categories that cohere past, for instance, wearing jeans with small pockets (or no pockets at all) or by participating in an activity that is similarly gender-coded, like child-rearing, or—importantly for Butler—having heterosexual sexual activity.38 These performative acts, equally she terms them, repeated then many times that they become taken equally fact, are what ascertain the gender categories that we have today. Butler'southward idea of gender equally performative moves away from an essentialist conception of the term: the thought that there is some innate or "essential" criteria that makes one, for instance, a woman or man. Merely these performances still reinforce the categories of gender, she reminds united states of america, even if the deportment and activities that determine them are not innate.
Gender is certainly complicated. This is one thing about which virtually gimmicky scholars of gender largely agree. Conceptions of gender in health and clinical fields are besides evolving as well. For example, the American Medical Association now calls gender a "spectrum" rather than a binary, and as of 2018 information technology issued a firm statement that "sex and gender are more than circuitous than previously assumed."https://www.ama-assn.org/press-middle/printing-releases/ama-adopts-new-policies-2018-interim-meeting.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">39 But it'due south important to recall that there have e'er been more than variations in gender identity and expression than most Anglo-Western societies have cared to acknowledge or to collectively think. This is evidenced in the range of regional and colloquial terms, such every bit kothi, hijra, and dhurani, that are currently used to describe the genders of people across Southern asia that fall exterior the binary; we run across information technology in the boosted umbrella terms, such as ii-spirit, that describe people in some North American Ethnic communities; and many more.TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly ane, no. 3 (August 2014): 320–337. On the latter, see Qwo-Li Driskill, "Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies," GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 16, no. 1–2 (April 2010): 69–92." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">forty Non to mention that some people are gender-fluid, pregnant their gender identity may shift from day to day, twelvemonth to year, or state of affairs to state of affairs. And still—at least in a US context—gender data is still well-nigh e'er collected in the binary categories of "male" and "female" and visually represented by some grade of binary division besides.41 This remains true even as a 2018 Stanford report constitute that, when given the choice among seven points on a gender spectrum, more than two-thirds of the subjects polled placed themselves somewhere in the middle.As survey designers, and data scientists more mostly, there would seem to be an obvious response to the Stanford study: collect gender information in more binary categories, making sure to disaggregate the data—that is, compare the data by genders during the assay phase. Ane contempo alternative to the binary, developed past Public Health England in collaboration with LGBTQ+ organizations in the United kingdom, is in evidence in figure 4.5. This 2-item questionnaire was designed for use in routine national surveillance of HIV in England and Wales to decide self-identified gender and cis or trans status in a public health context. The designers offer three named genders, a catch-all fourth category, and an option for not disclosing gender identity. In a split question, they enquire well-nigh gender at nascence, again giving an option for not disclosing. The survey pattern uses sensitive wording and inclusive terminology to allow trans and genderqueer populations to exist counted. These questions are being considered for expanded employ across other national wellness records and data drove systems in the United Kingdom.
Should all future gender data drove utilize this model? Non necessarily, and here's why: In a globe in which quantification always leads to authentic representation, and authentic representation always leads to positive alter, then always counting gender identities outside the binary makes perfect sense. But being represented too means being made visible, and existence made visible to the matrix of domination—which continuously develops laws, practices, and cultural norms to police the gender binary—poses significant risks to the health and rubber of minoritized groups. Under the electric current administration in the U.s.a., for example, transgender people are banned from serving in the war machine and, once identified as such, denied access to certain forms of healthcare.Race and the Teaching of Desire: Foucault'southward History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Printing; 1995); Deborah Miranda, "Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California," in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 347–360; and Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, "Introduction," TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly i, no. one–ii (May 2014): 1–18.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">43 This demonstrates some of the risks of having one'south gender counted as something other than man or woman—risks that tin occur in many contexts, depending on what data are beingness collected, by whom, and whether they are personally identifiable (or hands deanonymized). It'due south also important to recognize how trans and nonbinary people may peradventure be identified fifty-fifty within otherwise big datasets simply because in that location are fewer of them relative to the larger population. This possibility poses additional risks, in the form of unwanted attention in the case of people who would prefer non to disembalm their gender identity, or in the form of discrimination, violence, or even imprisonment, depending on the identify they live.Figure 4.5: From the Positive Voices survey of people living with HIV in England and Wales adult by Public Health England in collaboration with several partner organizations. This represents current best practices for collecting nonbinary gender data in an Anglo-Western public health context, merely information technology's notwithstanding important to recognize that different decisions might exist warranted depending on the context. Courtesy of Peter Kirwin, Public Wellness England, 2018.
As information scientists, what should we do amid these potential harms? Depending on the circumstances and the institution that is doing the collecting, the nigh upstanding conclusion can vary. It might be to avoid collecting data on whether someone is cis or transgender, to make all gender data optional, to non collect gender data at all, or fifty-fifty to stick with binary gender categories. Social ciphering researcher Oliver Haimson has asserted that "in most non-health inquiry, it's often not necessary to know participants' assigned gender at nascence."
The ethical complexity of whether to count gender, when to count gender, and how to count gender illuminates the complication of acts of classification against the backdrop of structural oppression. Because when it comes to data collection, and the categories that construction it, at that place are ability imbalances upwards and down, side to side, and everywhere in between. Considering of these asymmetries, information scientists must proceed with awareness of context (discussed further in affiliate 6) and an analysis of power in the drove environment (discussed further in affiliate 1) to determine whose interests are existence served by being counted, and who runs the risk of being harmed.
Rethinking Binaries in Data Visualization
A feminist critique of counting, and of the binary classification systems that often construction those acts, is not express to a focus on gender lonely. A binary logic also pervades our thinking about race, for example, as feminist scholars Brittney Cooper and Margaret Rhee explain. Drawing from ideas nigh intersectionality, they call for "hacking" the Black/white binary that, on the one hand, helps to expose the racism experienced past Black people in the United States and, on the other, erases the other forms of racism experienced by Ethnic likewise as Latinx, Asian American, and other minoritized groups. "Binary racial discourses elide our struggles for justice," they state plainly.Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology half dozen (January 2015), https://adanewmedia.org/2015/01/issue6-cooperrhee/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">47 Past challenging the binary thinking that erases the experiences of certain groups while elevating others, we can piece of work toward more merely and equitable information practices and consequently toward a more only and equitable future.Sometimes, nevertheless, the goal of challenging binary thinking tin exist constrained by the realities of the field. Visualization designers, for example, do not typically have control over the drove practices of the data they are asked to visualize. They often inherit binary data that they then demand to "hack" from within. What might this look like? We might point to the reporters on the Lifestyle Desk of the Telegraph, a British newspaper, who, in March 2018, were considering how to honor International Women'southward Day and were struck by the significant gender gap in the United Kingdom in terms of educational activity, politics, concern, and culture.Telegraph, March 8, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.united kingdom/women/concern/women-mean-business-interactive/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">48 As journalists, they were working with multiple sources of data collected by other agencies, which all came in binary form. But they wanted to ensure that they didn't further reinforce whatsoever gender stereotypes. They paid particular attention to colour. One line of designer logic would favor cultural convention for interpretability, like using pink for women and bluish for men, just a feminist line would use color choices to hack those same conventions (effigy 4.vi).Pink and blue is, after all, another hierarchy, and the goal of the Telegraph team members was to mitigate inequality, not reinforce it. So they took a unlike source for inspiration: the Votes for Women campaign of early twentieth-century England, in which majestic was employed to represent freedom and dignity and green to represent hope. When thinking well-nigh which of these colors to assign to each gender, they took a perceptual design principle as their guide: "Confronting white, majestic registers with far greater contrast and so should attract more attention when putting aslope the dark-green [sic], non by much merely just enough to tip the scales. In a lot of the visualisations men largely outnumber women, so information technology was a adequately simple method of bringing them back into focus," Fraser Lyness, the Telegraph's director of graphic journalism told visualization designer Lisa Charlotte Rost.Datawrapper, July 10, 2018, https://blog.datawrapper.de/gendercolor/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">49 Hither, one hierarchy—the bureaucracy in which colors are perceived past the middle—was employed to challenge another one: the hierarchy of gender. When put into practice, this elementary method had the outcome of communicating clearly without reinforcing stereotypes.Figure four.half-dozen: "Born Equal. Treated Unequally" was an interactive feature in the Telegraph in 2018 that examined the gender gap in the United Kingdom along a number of dimensions. Although the authors treated gender equally a binary category, they used color to challenge stereotypically man/woman color coding. Feature past Claire Cohen, Patrick Scott, Ellie Kempster, Richard Moynihan, Oliver Edgington, Dario Verrengia, Fraser Lyness, George Ioakeimidis, and Jamie Johnson, for the Telegraph.
But the Telegraph journalists could take gone 1 step further to rethink binaries. They had an opportunity to communicate to the public that gender is not a binary by spelling that out—in the text of the story or in a explanation nether the graphics or by showing visually that there was no data for nonbinary people. Their colleagues at the Guardian recently adopted this latter strategy in their interactive piece "Does the New Congress Reflect You lot?" about the 2018 US midterm elections.Guardian, updated June 7, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/u.s.a.-news/ng-interactive/2018/nov/15/new-congress-us-house-of-representatives-senate.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">50 The slice presents three categories: cis male, cis female person, and trans + nonbinary. When you click on "trans + nonbinary," equally in figure iv.7, the interactive map displays all of the districts in greyness, because "0 people in Congress are like y'all." The absence of information becomes an important takeaway, as meaningful equally the information themselves.https://www.youtube.com/lookout?v=JqzAuqNPYVM." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">51These examples have shown gender as a dimension of analysis, only how might we visually represent gender itself? This is a challenge of visualizing complication of the highest degree, and Amanda Montañez, a designer for Scientific American, took this challenge caput on (effigy 4.8). She was tasked with creating an infographic to back-trail an article on the evolving science of gender and sex—categories that she, like most people, viewed every bit singled-out but related.Scientific American Blog Network, August 29, 2017, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/visualizing-sex-as-a-spectrum/.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">52 Every bit she explains in a blog post on the Scientific American website, she first envisioned a simple spectrum, or perhaps two spectrums: one for sex and ane for gender." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">53 But she presently found confirmation of what we've been saying so far in this chapter: that few things in life can be truly reduced to binaries, and that insisting on binary categories of data drove—with respect to gender, to sex, to their relation, or to anything else—fails to acknowledge the value of what (or who) rests in betwixt and exterior.We have already established that gender is more than binary; but it's less unremarkably acknowledged that sex is more than a binary too. As feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling confirms, "In that location is no single biological measure that unassailably places each and every human into one of 2 categories—male person or female."New York Times, October 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/sex-biology-binary.html.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">54 Intersex people, who constitute an estimated ane.vii percent of the population, may have ovaries and a penis, or "mosaic genetics" in which some of i's cells take 20 chromosomes and some take XY.https://www.intersexequality.com/how-mutual-is-intersex-in-humans/." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">55 Information technology's also increasingly acknowledged that that sex, like gender, and sometimes together with gender, is multilayered and continuously unfolding throughout a person's life.Figure iv.7: "Does the New Congress Reflect Yous?" is a 2018 interactive that appeared in the Guardian. Users select their own demographic characteristics to see how many people like them are in the 2018 Congress. Clicking on "trans + nonbinary" leads to a bare map showing zero people in Congress like you. Prototype by Sam Morris, Juweek Adolphe, and Erum Salam for the Guardian.
To begin to represent this complexity, Montañez had to begin by rejecting much of the data and research that she and her research banana turned upward, either on account of flawed categories or on business relationship of flawed collection practices. She decided to focus on sex, and after an all-encompassing pattern procedure, which included consulting with domain experts, Montañez and the design firm Pitch Interactive, which helped finalize the diagram, arrived at the outcome. Beyond XX and XY is a complex diagram, which employs a color spectrum to represent the sex spectrum, a vertical axis to represent alter over time, and branching arrows to connect to text blocks that provide additional contextual information. The blueprint offers a beautifully executed visual challenge to the scientifically incorrect idea that there are simply ii sexes, and even that the concepts of sex and gender are wholly distinct. Visualization is frequently thought of every bit a way to reduce complication, but here it operates in the opposite—to push simple, oppressive ideas to exist more complex, nuanced, and just.
Refusing Data, Recovering Data
Montañez's graphic fabricated what was already counted count. In other words, she took what scientists and theorists knew to be true near the nature of sexual differentiation and made that knowledge more accessible and public. But counting in itself is not necessarily an unmitigated adept, nor is putting it on public display. Nosotros have already introduced the idea of the paradox of exposure where people are harmed by being made visible to a system. Simply because organisation designers from ascendant groups practise non experience the harms of being counted or of being made visible without consent—this is the privilege take chances, one time again—they rarely anticipate these needs or account for them in the blueprint process. This is the reason that questions about counting must be accompanied by questions about consent, as well as of personal safe, cultural dignity, and historical context.
Information technology's Facebook, one time again, that helps to prove this point. Information studies scholars Oliver Haimson and Anna Lauren Hoffman have studied the effects of the company's "real name" policy, under which the platform determines each user's registered proper noun to be either "existent" and authentic or simply "simulated."First Mon 21, no. 6 (June 10, 2016), https://doi.org/x.5210/fm.v21i6.6791.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">56 (In our teacher voices, nosotros now say: Does anyone annotation the problem with this binary thinking hither?) Haimson and Hoffman point out that trans and queer people may choose to have multiple online identities, which may be fluid and contextual and possibly necessary to protect themselves. As some other example, corruption survivors may need to have steps to make themselves unfindable through search, even every bit they still desire to exist connected to their loved ones.Figure four.8: Across Xx and XY (2017) visualizes the known factors that contribute to sexual differentiation at unlike stages of human being life, from conception to nascency to puberty and beyond. Reverse to received wisdom, sex is non a binary that is fixed at nascence, only rather a layered and time-based process of differentiation, with more than than ii possible outcomes. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 2017 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Compounding the contextual nature of these factors, Facebook enforces its real name policy algorithmically—flagging names with "also many" words or with unusual capital letters. Haimson and Hoffman annotation that Facebook'southward algorithms unduly flag Native American names for violation considering those names often differ in structure and form from Anglo-Western names (the field of study position of the systems' designers, and therefore presumed to be the default; the privilege take a chance again). What'southward more, users can as well written report other users for not having existent names, resulting in—for example—a single person systematically targeting several hundred drag queens' profiles for removal. Facebook claims that the existent proper noun policy exists for prophylactic, but Haimson and Hoffman clearly testify that the policy actively imperils the safety of some of the platform's virtually marginalized users. As we've already begun to suggest, sometimes the near ethical thing to exercise is to help people exist obscure, hidden, and invisible." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">57 The case of Facebook demonstrates the fundamental importance of obtaining consent when counting and of enabling individuals to refuse acts of counting and classification in low-cal of potential harms.
Acts of counting and classification, especially as they relate to minoritized groups, must ever balance harms and benefits. When data are collected near real people and their lives, risks ranging from exposure to violence are always present. But when deliberately considered, and when consent is obtained, counting can contribute to efforts to increment valuable and desired visibility. The Colored Conventions Projection (CCP), led by a team of students and faculty at the University of Delaware, demonstrates how to thoughtfully navigate this residuum in the present by looking at the past.58 Among the goals of the projection is to create a machine-readable corpus of meeting minutes from the nineteenth-century Colored Conventions: events in which Black Americans, fugitive and free, gathered to strategize nigh how to achieve legal, social, economic, and educational justice. These meeting minutes are valuable because they have yet to be counted, so to speak, in the stories commonly told about the movement to finish slavery in the nineteenth-century Usa. Those stories tend to privilege the actions of white abolitionists because theirs were the stories that were recorded in print. Only the Colored Conventions help to document the vital role of the Blackness activists who were working inside their own communities to end slavery and achieve liberation.
The creation of the corpus enables these important activists to be counted, equally well as have their words (every bit recorded in the coming together minutes) analyzed and incorporated into the historical record. Just the process of converting the meeting minutes into data strongly recalls the original violence that accompanied the slave trade, when human being lives—in fact, the very ancestors of these activists—were reduced to numbers and names. In recognition of this irreconcilable tension, the CCP requires that all those who download the corpus commit to a set of principles, including "a utilize of data that humanizes and acknowledges the Black people whose collective organizational histories are assembled" in the corpus, and a request to "contextualize and narrate the conditions of the people who appear equally 'data' and to name them when possible."http://coloredconventions.org/intro-corpus.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">59At that place is a second tension that the CCP navigates in an exemplary fashion, which has to do with the content of the corpus itself. Considering it is derived from the conventions' official meeting minutes, information technology records only the "official" participants in the conventions and the discussions they initiated. These participants were almost exclusively men. To accost this disparity, the CCP team asks its teaching partners to sign a Memo of Agreement (MoU) earlier introducing students to the project. The MoU requests that all instructors introduce a woman involved in the conventions, such as a wife, daughter, sis, or fellow church building member, alongside every male delegate who is named (figure 4.nine).http://coloredconventions.org/memo-of-understanding.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">60 From this work of recovery, the CCP is creating a second dataset of the women's names—those who would otherwise get uncounted and therefore unrecognized for their work. They are using data collection to make these contributions count.Effigy 4.9: An engraving of an 1869 Colored Convention, published in Harper'southward Weekly, showing men at the podium and women seated and standing in the rear. Image courtesy of Jim Casey.
Counting as Healing, Counting as Accountability
In the nineteenth century, every bit today, so many of the disparities introduced into datasets had to exercise with much larger and much more profound asymmetries of power. The asymmetries are ofttimes directly reflected in the ability dynamics between who is doing the counting and who is existence counted. But when a community is counting for itself, most itself, there is the potential that data collection can be not but be empowering but also healing. One example of this that draws from the personal experience of one of the authors of this book. It was 2014, and Catherine was a educatee and nursing her babe girl at the time, too as struggling to pump breastmilk for her in unsavory places like server rooms and bathroom floors. Frustrated, she and six student colleagues came together to publish a call for ideas and stories that could help to improve breast pump technology.
Figure 4.10: The 2018 Make the Chest Pump Not Suck Hackathon was the 2nd gathering of the customs at MIT and focused on racial equity in breastfeeding, as well every bit shifting paid leave policy in the United States. Photo by Rebecca Rodriguez and Ken Richardson, MIT Media Lab.
Although innovation spaces had long been holding hackathons for health technology, the 2014 upshot was one of the first about birth and breastfeeding. As such, information technology led to participants sharing stories in a space that was (temporarily) gratis of the stigma surrounding breastfeeding. These stories pointed to mutual experiences and patterns in the spirit of "the personal is political" consciousness-raising events. Participants recognized these stories as data that could exist used—and in fact were used—to demand more than from breast pump makers, from workplaces, and from society, to help transform the cocky-blame that women oftentimes experience as a consequence of difficulties with nascence and breastfeeding into collective political activeness." date-structured-value="" class="footnote">63
But action by whom, and activeness for whom? Following the 2014 effect, we (pregnant the organizers) reflected on its successes and its limitations—in particular, its lack of an intersectional approach.
Ensuring that the 2018 hackathon would fully welcome the participation of these families required multiple forms of accountability. Guided by Jenn Roberts, our lead organizer for equity and inclusion, we wrote a values statement and convened an informational board with leaders in breastfeeding, equity, and maternal health. We too adult a set of metrics to shape the demographics of the event.65 These metrics were designed to prioritize racial diversity, gender variety, multifariousness of sexual orientation, geographic diversity, and domain diversity, with additional priority given for young people and newcomers. On the application form, potential participants were encouraged to self-identify their gender and race, specify their location, and choose multiple options from a list of predefined domain expertise categories (like "parent" or "designer/creative person"). We also invited them to write about why they wanted to attend, and if they chose to disembalm information about their sexual orientation or their fiscal position, then we considered that information in the process.
Were these categories reductive? Of course they were. No person can fit their whole self into a form, regardless of how many blank text fields are provided. Did the form reflect the true nature of each person's intersecting identities and how those identities impact that person's beingness in the world? The reply to this question is also unsurprising: of course it did not. Just the process of collecting this demographic data—which was, crucially, undertaken voluntarily and from inside the customs itself—resulted in an event that was indeed guided by the noesis and feel of the groups that our coalition had hoped to centre.https://medium.com/make-the-breast-pump-non-suck-hackathon/edifice-community-at-our-hackathon-a08a76bb5ea6.
" date-structured-value="" class="footnote">66Catherine shared this experience with Lauren as we were beginning to draft this book, and we decided to use a similar procedure to aid concord ourselves accountable to the values that we wanted to inform Data Feminism and the criteria past which sure projects and texts would be selected for inclusion. We adamant specific numbers and percentages that, in our view, would help go on us accountable to those values, equally well as the categories of data collection that would be required to decide whether the metrics had been met. (These are viewable in the appendix, Our Values and Our Metrics for Belongings Ourselves Answerable.) At two phases in the procedure—first when we posted the draft of the manuscript online, and 2nd after nosotros submitted the manuscript for copyediting—one of our research administration, Isabel Carter, audited the projects and citations of the book. (They describe their research methods in more than detail in "Auditing Information Feminism," included equally another appendix.) As with the hackathon, these metrics were not the only method nosotros employed for belongings ourselves answerable. Nosotros also interviewed the creators of many of the projects we reference, cleared our quotes and portrayals of their work with them, and published a draft of the book online for open peer review, amidst other approaches.
Was our method of counting perfect? Of course not. We are certain we accept made mistakes. This is amidst the reasons that we decided to go along our disaggregated data private, even as we published the aggregated results. What about the idea to count people and projects in the start place? Shouldn't that be viewed as contributing to the same reduction in complication that we have argued against thus far in this book? As this chapter has demonstrated, counting is ever complicated. But undertaken deliberately, tailored to specific goals, and with issues of privacy and potential harms always in heed, counting tin can be used to support accountability—as one method, among many, of working toward a larger goal.
Rethink Binaries and Hierarchies
Counting and nomenclature tin can exist powerful parts of the procedure of creating cognition. But they're also tools of ability in themselves. Historically, counting and classification have been used to dominate, discipline, and exclude. This is where the fourth principle of data feminism, rethink binaries and hierarchies, enters in. The gender binary offers a key case of how nomenclature systems are synthetic by cultures and societies and reflect both their values and their biases. The cases of the TSA drome scanners, Facebook user profiles, and manifestly old pants show us how gender and sexual activity binaries—forth with scientifically incorrect understandings of both gender and sex—get encoded into technical systems (and besides jeans)! Those systems, in turn, recirculate erroneous and harmful ideas.
An intersectional feminist approach to counting insists that nosotros examine and, if necessary, rethink the assumptions and beliefs behind our classification infrastructure, every bit well as consistently probe who is doing the counting and whose interests are served. Counting and measuring practise non always have to be tools of oppression. We can too apply them to concur ability accountable, to reclaim overlooked histories, and to build collectivity and solidarity. When we count within our own communities, with consideration and intendance, we tin can work to rebalance unequal distributions of power.
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Source: https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/h1w0nbqp
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