Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

of concern’⁵) and the single largest category of these internally displaced populations were African American women. But despite their dominance amongst those affected, African American women’s voices were barely heard at all in planning efforts, either before or after the storm hit.⁶ This omission constituted a major gender data gap and resulted in a failure to direct resources towards those who were most vulnerable, which, said a 2015 Institute of Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) report, could easily have been predicted with proper research. Instead, by failing to consult women about their needs, planners were responsible for what the IWPR called a ‘third disaster’ following the twin disasters of the hurricane and subsequent flooding. And this third disaster was, ‘like the failure of the levees, of human origin’.

Most former tenants of New Orleans public housing wanted to – and assumed they would – return to their former homes after the clean-up. After all, ‘the Bricks’, as the four large housing projects within the city of New Orleans are known, were still standing. More than this, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, they were structurally sound and would be habitable after cleaning. But it was not to be. Even as ‘affordable and structurally sound homes in New Orleans remained in high demand’, funding was announced for the buildings to be demolished. They would be replaced with mixed-income housing which included only 706 public housing units compared to the 4,534 that had existed before.

Like ‘We Will Rebuild’ in Miami before them, the planners seemed to place business interests above the needs of ‘the now permanently displaced thousands of individuals, all low-income and the majority black women’. In their legal response to a 2007 lawsuit, the Housing Authority of New Orleans claimed that they had surveyed former tenants and the majority had said that they did not want to return to New Orleans. This is the opposite of what IWPR found, leaving many with the suspicion that ‘the decision to destroy the buildings may have been less about repairing disaster damage, or responding to the needs of those who had suffered losses and experienced traumas, and more about opportunistic urban redevelopment’.

Residents wanted to return to the Bricks because, like Brazil’s favelas, these public housing projects provided more than shelter: they provided a social infrastructure, filling in the gaps left by a laissez-faire state. ‘Public housing might not have been the best, but everybody was somebody’s momma back up in there,’ one woman told IWPR. When the women were displaced and dispersed – and then had their homes demolished – they lost all that. But because we don’t measure women’s unpaid work, a need to maintain such informal ties once again was not factored into any rebuilding efforts. The social networks provided by the housing projects also meant that women felt safer, which in turn made them more mobile. ‘[T]he city wasn’t too bad,’ explained one woman, ‘because everybody knew everybody, and then once you got towards Orleans and Claiborne [streets], you were safe because you knew everyone.’

The mobility of women living in the Bricks was also supported by the regular buses and variety of stores in walking distance. But again, all of that has changed. Walking is no longer an option for many of the displaced women who now live miles from the nearest stores. And bus schedules have been changed: where buses used to come along every fifteen minutes, it’s now not unusual to have to wait for an hour. One woman lost her job as a result. Rather like the planners behind Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida, transporting low-income women to their places of employment does not seem to have been considered a priority by the architects of New Orleans’ regeneration.

There is no international law requiring that women’s voices be included in post-disaster planning – although based on the evidence perhaps there should be. When it comes to post-conflict contexts, however, we have UN Security Council Resolution 1325.

UNSCR 1325 ‘urges all actors to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts’. Following ‘decades of lobbying’ from women’s rights activists,⁷ this landmark resolution was passed in 2000. But eighteen years on, further progress has been minimal. For a start, the available data is scant⁸ – which in itself is suggestive about the seriousness with which this resolution is taken. As for what data does exist, it’s hardly encouraging. Only two women have ever served as chief negotiators and only one woman has ever signed a final peace accord as chief negotiator.⁹ Funding for the implementation of policies related to women’s rights in post-conflict contexts remains ‘inadequate’,¹⁰ as does progress on the basic requirement of including women in all delegations.¹¹ Even where women are included, they remain in the minority and excluded from positions of power, and in some areas, we have even regressed: in 2016 only half of that year’s signed peace agreements contained gender-specific provisions, compared to 70% of signed peace agreements in 2015. In the June 2017 Afghanistan peace talks, women made up 6% of negotiators, 0% of mediators, and 0% of signatories.

Causal data for the sudden reversal between 2016 and 2017 is not available, but a clue comes courtesy of a participant at an off-the-record round table on women, peace and security at the International Peace Institute in New York in 2014. ‘The UN and other powerbrokers succumb to requests not to have women in the room,’ the participant claimed. ‘When the local government says “We don’t want women,” the international community compromises and says “OK.”’¹² As in post-disaster contexts, the reasoning given varies (cultural sensitivities; including women would delay the negotiations; women can be included after an agreement has been reached) but they all boil down to the same line that’s been used to fob women off for centuries: we’ll get to you after the revolution.

It’s a rationale that is clearly a function of sexism, a symptom of a world that believes women’s lives are less