#womenASCOA: The Importance of Closing the Gender Data Gap with Sarah Kemp
#womenASCOA: The Importance of Closing the Gender Data Gap with Sarah Kemp
“What we measure matters because we build solutions around data measurements,” said Organon’s head of global women’s health policy on how misinformation perpetuates inequality.
As part of the 10th Anniversary Women’s Hemispheric Network conference, Organon’s Sarah Kemp led a workshop that dove into the gender data gap and how it seeps into our daily lives—from economic data to the medicine to artificial intelligence. “Women are 47 percent more likely to be injured in a car crash because of how seatbelts and cars are designed,” Kemp said, giving an example of how the data gap translates into real life harm.
Kemp explained that because we track data for progress across industries, the existence of a hidden gender bias inevitably leads to inequalities and stunts progress in many sectors. This includes the design of everyday items like the height of kitchen cabinets, the width of piano keys, or voice recognition software, all of which were all designed based on men’s specifications.
On the medical front, Kemp highlighted how we lose out on possible new treatments because researchers don’t investigate gender distinctions and women are often excluded from clinical trials. Kemp gave the example of heart attacks: it has recently been discovered that they present themselves differently for women than men. Medicine recalls, to note another example, are often due to equal dosing recommendations for men and women that overlook the differences in needs based on gender. The hidden gender bias affects everyone, Kemp said, because “data is at the heart of everything we do.”
