In Australia, women’s presence in data is often cause for concern - for example, the way that women are monitored and controlled by the government when receiving welfare or attempting to collect child support; experiences magnified for Indigenous women. Their data invisibility can also be worrying; for example, when the time use survey dropped off in 2006 or when CALD women (and men) are excluded from mental health research. Data collection and use can create trauma, disadvantage and marginalisation; alternately divergent experiences are rendered invisible when data is not collected to tell silenced stories. In today’s analysis, the use and abuse of data gets the gender treatment from Marika Cifor (@marika_louise) and Patricia Garcia (@thebigfiveone). Together they led a workshop that created a “Manifest-No” which details both the harms and potential of data collection from a feminist and intersectional perspective. In today’s analysis they provide a rationale as well as a summary of main points; read the entire Manifest-No here, and find more information on the Manifest-No here.

Feminism is plural; there are many feminisms and they may differ in their positive visions, methodologies, collective ends, and situated concerns. What allows them to “hang together” as different but still feminist is the refusal of an inheritance - an inheritance of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Refusal is work, one that - at its best - can help different feminisms recognize interlocking struggles across domains, across contexts and cultures, and that enables us to work in solidarity to prop up and build resilience with one another - to generate mutually reinforcing refusals.

How does data, information, and technology interact with and overlay culture, ethics and people? It’s time to place a feminist lens over data collection and use. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In August of 2019, we (Marika Cifor and Patricia Garcia) brought together a group of ten scholars for a “Feminist Data Studies Workshop” hosted by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan. The workshop was motivated by the need to create a space for coalition-building between feminist data scholars situated across disciplines and actively working toward dismantling inherited and harmful data regimes. Rather than work within the confines of disciplinary silos, we collaborated on solidifying feminist data studies as an emergent field of inquiry and practice. We worked collectively to interrogate the intersections of data, information, technology, culture, ethics, and people. We celebrated and learned from Latinx, Black, queer, trans- and Indigenous feminist thinkers who have mobilized critical refusal as a powerful tool to open up and insist on radical and alternate futures.

The result of our shared thinking is a collaboratively drafted Manifesto-NO -- a set of refusals and commitments for feminist data studies. Situating our work within a long genealogy of feminist thinking and praxis, following Ruha Benjamin, we drafted the Manifest-NO as a way to “remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the worlds you cannot live within.” Thus, the Manifest-NO serves as a declaration of refusal that dismantles harmful data structures and practices, as well as a declaration of commitments that enable us to imagine and to engender new data futures.

1. We refuse to operate under the assumption that risk and harm associated with data practices can be bounded to mean the same thing for everyone, everywhere, at every time. We commit to acknowledging how historical and systemic patterns of violence and exploitation produce differential vulnerabilities for communities.

2. We refuse to be disciplined by data, devices, and practices that seek to shape and normalize racialized, gendered, and differently-abled bodies in ways that make us available to be tracked, monitored, and surveilled. We commit to taking back control over the ways we behave, live, and engage with data and its technologies.

3. We refuse the use of data about people in perpetuity. We commit to embracing agency and working with intentionality, preparing bodies or corpuses of data to be laid to rest when they are not being used in service to the people about whom they were created.

4. We refuse to understand data as disembodied and thereby dehumanized and departicularized. We commit to understanding data as always and variously attached to bodies; we vow to interrogate the biopolitical implications of data with a keen eye to gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, nationality, and other forms of embodied difference.

5. We refuse any code of phony “ethics” and false proclamations of transparency that are wielded as cover, as tools of power, as forms for escape that let the people who create systems off the hook from accountability or responsibility. We commit to a feminist data ethics that explicitly seeks equity and demands justice by helping us understand and shift how power works.

6. We refuse the expansion of forms of data science that normalizes a condition of data extractivism and is defined primarily by the drive to monetize and hyper-individualize the human experience. We commit to centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.

7. We refuse to accept that data and the systems that generate, collect, process, and store it are too complex or too technical to be understood by the people whose lives are implicated in them. We commit to seek to make systems and data intelligible, tangible, and controllable.

8. We refuse work about minoritized people. We commit to mobilizing data so that we are working with and for minoritized people in ways that are consensual, reciprocal, and that understand data as always co-constituted.

9. We refuse a data regime of ultimatums, coercive permissions, pervasive cookie collective, and blocked access. Not everyone can safely refuse or opt out without consequence or further harm. We commit to “no” being a real option in all online interactions with data-driven products and platforms and to enacting a new type of data regime that knits the “no” into its fabric.

10. We refuse to “close the door behind” ourselves. We commit to entering ethically compromised spaces like the academy and industry not to imbricate ourselves into the hierarchies of power but to subvert, undermine, open, make possible.

Our refusals and commitments together demand that data be acknowledged as at once an interpretation and in need of interpretations. Data can be a check-in, a story, an experience or set of experiences, and a resource to begin and continue dialogue. It can – and should always – resist reduction. Data is a thing, a process, and a relationship we make and put to use. We can make and use it differently.

The drafting of the Manifest-NO was led by Marika Cifor (University of Washington) and Patricia Garcia (University of Michigan). In addition to their efforts, the first complete draft is the collective labor of TL Cowan (University of Toronto); Jasmine Rault (University of Toronto); Tonia Sutherland (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa); Anita Say Chan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Jennifer Rode (University College London); Anna Lauren Hoffmann (University of Washington); Niloufar Salehi (University of California, Berkeley); and Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan).

Read more, including the full version of the Manifest-NO, here.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here and follow us on Twitter @PolicyforWomen

Women in data: Time for a Manifest-NO