The Data Paradox of Being a Woman
Damned if there’s no data, dismissed when there is.
I was always called an angry girl growing up. I got mad at the small injustices I faced. My family would lecture me about how I shouldn’t be so angry for a 10-, 13-, 15-year-old girl. The girl part always infuriated me, as if girls can’t be angry.
Boys can throw temper tantrums well into their 70s (see Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and even some men around you). Yet, a 15-year-old girl who subconsciously understood the subtle xenophobia, racism, and misogyny that she faced wasn’t allowed to be mad.
I live in a paradox, just like every other woman.
I’m supposed to be grateful. I immigrated to what used to be one of the freest nations in the world. I have an incredible education, a great job, and a supportive family. I am freer than the women who came before me. I live a very good life.
Yet, I am bombarded by misogyny every single day.
From personal experiences of assault, harassment, catcalling, casual sexism at work, among friends, family, and strangers, to watching my rights being debated and stripped away as if my life is an object to be managed. A uterus to be controlled.
This paradox also exists in how women’s data is collected and leveraged.
Women’s experiences are often overlooked in datasets. There’s a well-documented gender data gap in every industry. We’re missing from healthcare, public transportation, city design, childcare (!!), economics, sports—everything that makes up a functioning society.
Even when women’s experiences are studied and represented, when the data is loud, glaring, and undeniable, change is slow, non-existent, or regressive.
We KNOW that 1 in 6 women are assaulted in the United States in their lifetime. Yet, the US has elected a rapist as president.
We know that companies with more women in leadership are 25% more likely to outperform financially. Yet, DEI programs are getting slashed.
The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country: 22 deaths per 100,000 births. 80% of those deaths are preventable. Other countries? Less than 5 per 100,000. Yet, reproductive rights are under attack.
I live with two opposing truths that define womanhood:
Truth #1: My experiences are denied because they're not in the data.
I worry for my safety walking or Ubering home alone at night, because there is little research on women’s safety.
I’m told to “be grateful” at work, expected to do the grunt work to “prove myself”, while the men at my level don’t have to, because there’s little research on the gendered and racial biases of male leadership.
I’m told my race no longer matters for opportunities, since I’m South Asian. As if I don’t still get asked, “Where are you really from?” As if people don’t still comment on my skin tone, assume I’ll be forced into an arranged marriage, or act surprised that I speak English “so well.” All while data on women like me is still scarce in the U.S.
Truth #2: Even when there is data to back up my experiences, I am gaslit.
A few weeks ago, my friends and I presented at a startup pitch about a women’s travel safety app idea. The panel consisted of four men and one woman. Great odds for us.
Even though we started with clear data, 80% of women fear for their safety while traveling, and walked through market research and survey insights, one male judge had the audacity to give us the feedback:
“Summary of the survey info would have helped - personal experience not sufficient to define a market.”
This is just a sliver of the daily gaslighting women face.
If this mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion of living in this paradox isn’t enough, we’re still expected to be grateful for the scraps of freedom we’ve been given. Because women aren’t treated as full humans, any ounce of freedom is dangled like a gift, constantly under threat of being taken away the moment we stop saying thank you.
So to my women who are exhausted by the paradox:
Trust your experiences. They matter.
When something feels wrong, it probably is. We carry generations of intuition, resistance, and survival in our bones. You deserve better than the car dealer charging you more because you’re a woman. You deserve better than walking home at night with poorly lit streets and a lack of safety. You deserve better than being gaslit out of promotions, out of wanting kids, out of not wanting kids, out of everything.
You are not the problem. The world is.
Build your community and lean into it.
My community of women is the reason I am confident, ambitious, and compassionate. I was the girl who was constantly told she was “too much”. Too angry, too loud, too bossy. I was the girl that people tried to beat into the small, shy, obedient box. My community of female friends, coworkers, and mentors remind me that these traits make me incredible.
Do what you want.
Seriously, if there’s anything I’d love for a woman to take away, it’s this:
No version of womanhood will appease the world as it exists now.
There is no data discovery that will be the silver bullet to gaining equality. There is not enough smiling or being nice to get people to listen to us. Whiteness will not save women. Nothing will shield us from the harm of systems that weren’t built for us. So why try to fit into them?
I’ll end with my favorite quote from Nikki Kendall:
“Women do not have to be respectable to be valuable.”
There are women, especially the 51% of White women who voted for Donald Trump, who uphold the belief that some women are less valuable. That if women are not white, cis, straight, or aligned with their politics and religion, their worth is negotiable. That respectability is the price of their humanity.
With that belief, we are burying Palestinian women, Jewish women, Black women, Indigenous women, Transwomen, poor women and countless more. We are burying women who are seen as disposable because they don’t fit into the patriarchal, racist, misogynistic mold of what is “acceptable.”
Women do not have to be respectable to be valuable.