Gender equality machineries: the quest for enhanced gender data

This piece underscores the necessity of “enhanced” gender-centric data—official, intersectional data with new batteries of questions, based on situational knowledge, and disaggregated at the city level. Those data are crucial for gender equality machineries (GEM) in their pursuit of gender equity, particularly in societies with a colonial past of enslavement. However, issues of state capacity, GEM’s overstretching, and elected officials’ political will may pose significant challenges to the production of enhanced gender data. Furthermore, in some polities, unofficial data might be more credible. While the dissemination of anonymized data that comply with existing privacy laws might trigger the formation and action of counter-groups, enhanced gender data enable GEMs to devise evidence-based public policies and equity-seeking gender groups to press for the implementation of those policy initiatives.