Deluge of data on people’s behaviour promises to transform development practice
But taken at face value, data alone can mislead and lead to wrong conclusions
We need to delve deeper and address underlying societal prejudices instead
Nicola Pearson
…the problem with data is that they don’t always tell the whole story. Simply analysing the numbers can unintentionally reinforce gender stereotypes and even create solutions to problems that themselves go on to become part of the problem.
Martin Hilbert, an economist and social scientist at the University of California, Davis, who helped create SciDev.Net’s digital divide interactive feature, calls for caution here. He says that simply stating the negative correlation between being a woman and ICT access and use can reinforce the assumption that women are less technically able than men or dislike technology, so stay away from it. When Hilbert added levels of income, employment and education to data on ICT use, he found that women with an equal level to men…
See more at: http://www.scidev.net/global/data/editorials/data-gender-ict-digital-divide.html
