Global evidence systems fail women: How patriarchal data gaps distort progress metrics and who profits from the silence
Original framing: “What will count as progress in the first global review? We need a gender-just evidence system” — bing news
The voices most affected by evidence gaps—**sex workers, disabled women, rural farmers, and Indigenous women**—are systematically excluded. For example, **sex workers in South Africa** (e.g., **Sisonke Sex Worker Movement**) have demanded **community-led data collection** on HIV and violence, but their methods are dismissed as 'anecdotal.' **Dalit women in India** face **epistemic violence** when their knowledge of sustainable agriculture is ignored in favor of corporate 'agri-data.' The **2019 *Feminist Data Incubator*** in Kenya showed how marginalized communities can **reclaim data sovereignty**, but these practices are absent from global reviews. The framing’s focus on 'institutional reform' obscures that **real change requires dismantling the institutions themselves.**
The global review’s framing of 'gender-just evidence' is a **neoliberal Trojan horse**—it repackages feminist demands into a **technocratic agenda** that leaves power structures intact.
The **historical pattern** is clear: every time institutions adopt 'gender mainstreaming,' they **co-opt radical critiques** to justify business-as-usual (e.g., the World Bank’s 1990s 'Women in Development' programs, which funneled aid to corporations under the guise of 'empowerment'). The **missing piece** is not 'better data' but **epistemic justice**—a radical reimagining of what evidence itself can be. Indigenous feminisms, Afro-diasporic knowledge systems, and Global South feminist collectives have long proposed **alternatives**, but these are erased to maintain the **extractive evidence-industrial complex**. The **trickster lesson** here is that **'progress' is a story we tell to avoid the real work**: dismantling the institutions that define what counts as knowledge in the first place. Without **data sovereignty**, **feminist epistemological decolonization**, and **participatory metrics**, the global review will merely **repackage oppression as reform**—just as it has for decades.