Our Values and Our Metrics for Achieving Them

We insist on intersectionality

Feminism has always been multi-vocal and multi-racial, but the movements' diverse voices have not always been valued equally. The women's suffrage movement largely excluded Black women and the abolition of slavery from its agenda. In 1969, lesbian feminists were called "the lavender menace" by straight feminists. But feminism fails altogether if it is only for elite, white, straight, Christian, Anglo women. The work of activists and scholars, particularly Black feminists, over the past forty years insists on a feminism that is intersectional, meaning it looks at issues of social power related not just to gender, but also to race, class, ability, sexuality, immigrant status, and more. It does so, moreover, by looking to collectives as well as individuals, structural issues as well as specific instances of injustice.

We advocate for equity

Equity is both an outcome and a process. Future justice must account for an unjust past in which some groups' knowledges have been valued and others have been "subjugated," as Patricia Hill Collins teaches us. In the process of achieving equity, those of us in positions of relative power must learn to listen deeper and listen differently – with the ultimate goal of taking action against the status quo that benefits us at the expense of others. For this reason, we listen and give priority in the text to voices who speak from marginalized perspectives, whether because of their gender, ability, race, class, colonial status, or other aspects of their identity.

We prioritize proximity

As Kimberly Seals Allers, women's health advocate, says, "Whatever the question, the answer is in the community." People in a community know its problems intimately, and they know which phenomena go uncounted, underreported, or neglected by institutions in power (or, conversely, who is overly surveilled by institutions in power). They also know what interventions will work to solve those problems. In this book, we try to prioritize voices with closer and more direct experience of issues of injustice over those that study a data injustice from a distance.

We acknowledge the humanity of data

We recognize that the transformation of human experience into data often entails a reduction in complexity and context. We further acknowledge that there is a long history of data being “all too often wielded as an instrument of oppression, reinforcing inequality and perpetuating injustice,” as the group Data for Black Lives explains. We keep these inherent constraints in mind as we write, attempting to introduce context and complexity whenever possible, and acknowledge the limits of the methods we discuss as well as their strengths.

We are reflexive, transparent and accountable

Acknowledging that our knowledge is shaped by our own perspectives and limitations, we strive to be reflexive, transparent, and accountable for our work. We are on a journey towards justice and that inevitably involves making mistakes. We are grateful to those who have shown us generosity in letting us learn up to this point. And we respectfully say to our future teachers that you will find in us open listeners – we recognize direct and critical words as a generous offer and a vote of confidence in our ability to hear and be transformed by you.

To that end, we have an evolving table of explicit metrics that will guide us in auditing our citations and the examples that we elevate in the book. We note, here, that our foregrounding of race and racism reflects our location in the United States, where the most entrenched issues of inequality and injustice have racism at their source.

NB: The metrics for this draft (see “Draft Metrics” below) were compiled by Izii Carter, a graduate student of journalism and research assistant for the Data Feminism project. We plan to take these metrics into account as we revise, and will release the final metrics upon the publication of the book.