In May 2016, a Western media outlet echoed recent research warnings that the lives of girls and women, particularly in non-Western countries, are often missing from official statistics. In the article, David McNair, director of transparency and accountability at an international Africa-centered nonprofit advocacy organization, explained that we have a sexist data crisis because “women and girls are disproportionately left out of data collection. They are uncounted, therefore they don't matter.”1
The situation is not necessarily different for data about girls and women in Western countries. At the Archives Matter Conference held at Goldsmiths University of London in June 2016, the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed discussed the absence of data on sexual assault at UK universities, the confidentiality clause responsible, and the violence, lack of accountability, and institutional failures that this missing data represents. At that time, she had just resigned from her university post as director of the...
University of California Press