US and World Bank Team Up to Improve Data on Women

In the maternal health community, we often decry a lack of good data, which is often echoed by others working on a number of women’s issue. In order to address some of these data gaps, the U.S. government and the World Bank have launched initiatives with specific focuses on data on women.

The Bank’s Gender Data Portal and the U.S. government’s Data 2X will attempt to fill gender gaps in data. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim appeared at an event in Washington to announce the projects. Secretary Clinton noted:

For too many countries, we lack reliable and regular data on even the basic facts about the lives of women and girls – facts like when they have their first child, how many hours of paid and unpaid work they do, whether they own the land they farm. And since women make up half the population, that’s like having a black hole at the centre of our data-driven universe.