Empowering Women Through Data

Abisage Awuor, a crew member, and Cetrine Ivasha from the Waterbus project, Kenya

Data is essential to women's empowerment. It helps us identify inequalities, inform policies, improve accountability, and is key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and ending the climate crisis.

In honor of International Women’s Day, here are five ways in which data is critical to empowering women:

1. Identifying inequalities

Data disaggregated by sex illuminates disparities between women and men in all aspects of life, from education to the climate crisis. It helps us better understand the many ways in which women and girls are more vulnerable to the climate crisis globally, but also how they leading the way on climate adaptation and mitigation efforts.  

Data also makes it clear that violent conflict is not gender neutral. In Ukraine, data demonstrates that this war has become one of the most gendered displacement crises in modern times. Women make up about 60 per cent of the 7.7 million internally displaced adults, while women and children represent 90 per cent of the 5.6 million refugees who have fled the country.  

Critical data from projects like CARE and UNWomen’s Rapid Gender Analysis has helped reveal the many ways that women are experiencing the war differently, from shouldering more unpaid work to being exposed to increased gender-based violence and having reduced access to healthcare and reproductive services.

Photo: UN Women/Roman Mamedov

2. Awareness and action

Data can be used to create better policies and programs. The numbers show that almost one in three women worldwide have experienced gender-based violence (GBV). Few countries have been as committed to improving GBV data collection and translating it into evidence-based policy as Canada.

In 2017, Canada launched its first federal GBV strategy, allocating 14 per cent of the total budget to investing in better data collection, including survey data. This type of data was understood as an essential supplement to police reports, given the fact that GBV is chronically underreported and often does not meet the threshold of criminal action. Surveys were conducted to fill gaps in data from diverse populations including indigenous peoples, rural communities, migrants/refugees, and transgender/gender-diverse people. The resulting data was used to inform Canada’s National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, launched in November 2022.

Photo: Reuters

3. Measuring progress

Data is a powerful way to determine whether a policy is working or not. Across Africa, customary land practices have historically disadvantaged women, who face significant barriers to land inheritance and ownership. In the 2000s, the Rwandan government began to use sex-disaggregated data to inform progressive land reform policies. In 2004, it introduced the Land Tenure Regularization Program, which formalized land ownership across the country, with a specific focus on addressing gender disparities.

The data show that the LTR was successful in promoting women’s land ownership in many ways. According to Rwanda’s National Land Authority, by 2019, 88 per cent of Rwandan women owned land. Currently in 2024, 68 per cent of land titles are owned or co-owned by women.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

4. Transparency and trust

Data allows us to hold governments, organizations, and other stakeholders accountable for their commitments to gender equality. By reducing pink-washing, increasing transparency, and providing objective measures of progress, data can motivate decision-makers to prioritize women's empowerment and allocate resources accordingly.

Companies committed to the advancement of women now have a data- and evidence-based way to invest in this goal. Empower Co. enables companies to invest in women through quantified units of social impact. This novel approach to investing in social impact is transparent, traceable, and low-risk for companies because it is based on existing outcomes. Our model relies upon data that has been rigorously collected and third-party audited. 

5. Motivating and moving forward

When we can identify improvements through data, we can celebrate hard-won successes—which inspires us to keep fighting for the advancement of women. The project Empower Co. represents in Kitui, Kenya has benefitted 14,250 smallholder women farmers, ensuring they have greater financial literacy, access to crop insurance, and knowledge of climate-resilient farming techniques. In Kisumu, Kenya, the Waterbus project we represent has achieved a 72% increase of time savings for women, who can now travel safely and efficiently around Lake Victoria instead of via dangerous fishing boats or rural roads. The project we represent in Nepal has saved 7,200 women an average of 2.26 hours per day by replacing wood-fired stoves with cleaner burning biogas.

This data gives us hope—and beyond the numbers we are constantly inspired by the women who are part of these projects, from Abisage Awuor, a female ferry captain in Kenya, to Veranice Alves, a women leading her own agroforestry system in Brazil.

We see, celebrate, and will keep working tirelessly to amplify your power.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Photo by Philipp Kauffmann