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Woman in Aleppo
Women Under Siege is a project that crowdsources data on sexual violence in Syria. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters
Women Under Siege is a project that crowdsources data on sexual violence in Syria. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

Five ways tech is crowdsourcing women’s empowerment

This article is more than 8 years old

From gathering data on street harassment in Egypt to finding respectful gynaecologists in India, technology is helping women fight discrimination


Around the world, women’s rights advocates are crowdsourcing their own data rather than relying on institutional datasets.

Citizen-generated data is especially important for women’s rights issues. In many countries the lack of women in positions of institutional power, combined with slow, bureaucratic systems and a lack of prioritisation of women’s rights issues means data isn’t gathered on relevant topics, let alone appropriately responded to by the state.

Even when data is gathered by institutions, societal pressures may mean it remains inadequate. In the case of gender-based violence, for instance, women often suffer in silence, worrying nobody will believe them or that they will be blamed. Providing a way for women to contribute data anonymously or, if they so choose, with their own details, can be key to documenting violence and understanding the scale of a problem, and thus deciding upon appropriate responses.

Crowdsourcing data on street harassment in Egypt

Using open source platform Ushahidi, HarassMap provides women with a way to document incidences of street harassment. The project, which began in 2010, is raising awareness of how common street harassment is, giving women’s rights advocates a concrete way to highlight the scale of the problem.

As with any dataset, it has its limitations. Naturally, reports cannot be verified, and because contributions to the data are voluntary rather than systematic, the data isn’t geographically comprehensive. There is a natural self-selection bias in terms of the women who contribute – they are part of the population with access to the technology and skills needed to contribute. Despite this, it has provoked discussion around the treatment of women on the streets of Cairo, and is still one of the most talked about initiatives of this kind.

Documenting experiences of reporting sexual harassment and violence to the police in India

Last year, The Ladies Finger, a women’s zine based in India, partnered with Amnesty International to support its Ready to Report campaign, which aimed to make it easier for survivors of sexual violence to file a police complaint. Using social media and through word of mouth, it asked the community if they had experiences to share about reporting sexual assault and harassment to the police. Using these crowdsourced leads, The Ladies Finger’s reporters spoke to people willing to share their experiences and put together a series of detailed contextualised stories. They included a piece that evoked a national outcry and spurred the Uttar Pradesh government to make an arrest for stalking, after six months of inaction.

Nisha Susan, editor of The Ladies Finger, says victim shaming when these reports of violence take place is “notorious” and a lot of this goes undocumented. By asking their networks to share the stories, they shed light on a common, but often-ignored pattern of women being treated disrespectfully when reporting violence to the police.

Reporting sexual violence in Syria

Women Under Siege is a global project by Women’s Media Centre that is investigating how rape and sexual violence is used in conflicts. Its Syria project crowdsources data on sexual violence in the war-torn country. Like HarassMap, it uses the Ushahidi platform to geolocate where acts of sexual violence take place. Where possible, initial reports are contextualised with deeper media reports around the case in question.

Criticism of the initiative centres around the validity of the data, as verifying the incidents is difficult given the context. But gathering the data is a step towards making sure that incidences of sexual violence aren’t forgotten or ignored, and may eventually be used to bring perpetrators to justice.

Finding respectful gynaecologists in India

After recognising that many women in her personal networks were having bad experiences with gynaecologists in India, Delhi-based Amba Azaad began – with the help of her friends – putting together a list of gynaecologists who had treated patients respectfully called Gynaecologists We Trust. As the site says, “Finding doctors who are on our side is hard enough, and when it comes to something as intimate as our internal plumbing, it’s even more difficult.”

For now, the initiative uses a simple Google Docs sheet, and focuses on the positive, rather than the negative; patients are encouraged to write down only gynaecologists with whom they have had good experiences, rather than doctors to avoid. As with many of the other initiatives in similar spaces, it relies on contributors being trustworthy and submitting accurate data, as anybody can contribute.

In 2011, Take Back the Tech, an initiative from the Association for Progressive Communications, started a map gathering incidences of tech-related violence against women. Campaign coordinator Sara Baker says crowdsourcing data on this topic is particularly useful as “victims/survivors are often forced to tell their stories repeatedly in an attempt to access justice with little to no action taken on the part of authorities or intermediaries”. Rather than telling that story multiple times and seeing it go nowhere, their initiative gives people “the opportunity to make their experience visible (even if anonymously) and makes them feel like someone is listening and taking action”.

Crucially, the data gathered through Take Back the Tech’s efforts is actively used in its advocacy against online violence against women, and it works with local partners to make sure it feeds into country-based advocacy too. Last year, it commissioned an analysis of the data gathered in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish between 2012 and mid-2014, which provided useful insights into who faces this kind of violence, their experiences and typical responses, allowing it to shape their advocacy strategies appropriately. For women’s rights organisations focusing on the digital space, this kind of data can be invaluable, helping them unite people facing violence online.

Zara Rahman is an information activist. Follow @zararah on Twitter.

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter. Join the conversation with the hashtag #SheMatters.

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