gender data gap

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the systematic absence of data disaggregated by sex and gender across critical domains of public life including health, economics, transport, urban design, climate, and criminal justice, resulting in policies, products, and services that default to male experience as the norm and inadequately serve women's needs; popularised by journalist Caroline Criado Perez in her 2019 book Invisible Women, the concept reveals how the failure to collect gender-disaggregated data leads to medical treatments calibrated on male physiology that perform poorly for women, urban infrastructure designed around male travel patterns, and safety equipment such as seat belts and personal protective equipment sized for male bodies; closing the gender data gap requires deliberate inclusion of gender analysis in data collection, research design, and policy evaluation across all sectors