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5 Questions on Data and Feminist Economics with Mercedes D’Alessandro

Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella)
DATA FEMINISM
Published in
25 min readJun 26, 2020
“Inequality isn’t that I’m angry, and I’m complaining. Inequality isn’t a feeling of mine, or a thought. Inequality is something that exists, that we can see, that we can measure,” says Mercedes D’Alessandro.

Mercedes D’Alessandro is an Argentinean economist, writer, and activist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She taught economics at the University of Buenos Aires for over a decade before starting a blog called Economía Femi(s)ta (Feminist Economics) in 2015. The blog quickly gained widespread recognition and catapulted the conversation about gender equality into Argentina’s mainstream debates about public policy. In 2016, D’Alessandro published Economía Femi(s)ta the book — which is already in its fifth edition. She was a member of the Network for Political Innovation in Latin America and the creator of Feminindex, a voter guide for Argentineans to understand where politicians stand on issues related to gender rights like abortion, sex education and LGBTQ+ rights. Since D’Alessandro and I talked, she has been appointed the Director of Economics and Gender in the Ministry of Economy in Argentina (a new directorate).

We feature D’Alessandro’s work on the Feminindex in the conclusion of Data Feminism as an illustratration of feminist data science. There, we define data science as a field that “includes more than quantitative methods, more than ‘big’ data, more than ‘artificial’ intelligence, and more than ‘neutral’ displays of information.” In addition to those conventional tools of data science, feminist data science takes…

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DATA FEMINISM
DATA FEMINISM

Published in DATA FEMINISM

This publication showcases an edited selection of interviews from the book “Data Feminism” (MIT Press, 2020) by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein.

Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella)
Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella)

Written by Catherine D'Ignazio (she/ella)

Associate Prof of Urban Science and Planning, Dept of Urban Studies and Planning. Director, Data + Feminism Lab @ MIT.

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