Member-only story
5 Questions on Data and Gender with Joni Seager
By Catherine D’Ignazio with editing by Isabel Carter
Feminist geographer Joni Seager is the author of The Women’s Atlas, now in its fifth edition, a groundbreaking text that changed the way we think about, track, and visualize data on women and gender around the globe. Over 200 pages, Seager’s Atlas illustrates the status of women in the world via maps on equality, motherhood, beauty, violence, lesbian rights, and more. As her work makes clear, data that includes information on peoples’ gender and their gendered experiences remains severely under-collected, but where it does exist, it allows us to look more accurately and with more imagination at the lives of women and girls and the obstacles they face.
In Data Feminism, Lauren Klein and I discuss Seager’s work in relation to data and power. We titled a whole chapter after something Seager said in relation to data collection: “What Gets Counted Counts.” Part of data feminism is recognizing when feminism happens — a project may be feminist in form, content and/or process. The Women’s Atlas falls squarely into the content category -– the radical act is in choosing to map that which has been systematically neglected: women’s lives and experiences around the globe. Below is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for clarity.
