Subject: Fortune: “Hillary Clinton spurs 'gender data revolution'”
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Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 15:27:41 -0500
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*Fortune: “Hillary Clinton spurs 'gender data revolution'”
<http://fortune.com/2014/12/15/hillary-clinton-gender-data/>*

By Caroline Fairchild

December 15, 2014, 3:03 p.m. EST

[Subtitle:] Through Data2x, Clinton unveiled new partnerships to improve
data collection and help address gender issues around the world.

There’s not much news in Hillary Clinton getting on a stage to champion
women and girls. The former First Lady turned former Secretary of State
turned rumored presidential candidate has made the economic progress of
women a priority throughout her career. Yet after years of finding her
efforts being met with mostly indifference, Clinton is perfecting her
approach.

On Monday, Clinton announced six new partnerships with global organizations
to power a “gender data revolution.” Data2X, an initiative announced by
Clinton in 2012, is working to use data to advance gender equality and
women’s empowerment. An initiative led by the United Nations Foundation
with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation, Data2x provides a
platform for global leaders to foster greater collaboration on the topic of
gender data in global development. Gender data around the world on key
topics remains limited, and Data2x is focused on creating partnership that
will create a full picture of the lives of women and girls. Moreover,
without the right data, Clinton feels that you can’t make the case for why
public policies around the world need to change.

“I got tired of seeing otherwise thoughtful people smile and nod when I
raised these issues [women and girls],” said Clinton at an event at
Bloomberg Philanthropies in New York. “Foreign leaders, business
executives, even senior officials in our own government. You can just see
the wheels turning, like, ‘Oh right, I knew she was going to raise women
and girls. I will just smile, it will pass and then we’ll talk about really
important things.’ Over and over again this was an experience I had.”

Data2x has identified 28 gaps in data on women across health, education,
economic opportunities, political participation and human security. Several
years ago in India, for example, only 6% of women were officially counted
as employed. After further research, it was discovered that women do six
hours of unpaid work on average outside of the traditional economy every
day. If leaders in India brought these women into the paid economy at the
same level as men, the country’s GDP would increase by $1.7 trillion.

This, says Clinton, is just one of countless ways that the numbers can
support a case for a shift in how leaders are addressing the issues. The
International Labour Organization, the World Bank and the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are working specifically to
help implement news definitions of work and employment with problems like
the one in India in mind.

“If you don’t measure, you can’t manage. You can’t understand what the
problem is,” said Clinton. “It’s not enough any longer to make the case on
moral rights grounds…We are not making the progress we should be if that is
the principle, and in sometimes exclusive, argument that we are making.”

Other new partnerships through Data2x include an effort to get more women
access to financial services. There is an estimated $300 billion credit
shortage for women-owned companies in emerging economies, and the Global
Banking Alliance for Women along with the International American
Development Bank are collaborating to provide sex-disaggregated data by
banks around the world.

Clinton announced the news partnerships along with former New York City
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, United Nations Foundation President and CEO Kathy
Calvin, and her daughter Chelsea Clinton. Prior to addressing the crowd,
Bloomberg shared that a few years ago Bloomberg Philanthropies started
working to address maternal deaths in Tanzania. Suffering from one of the
highest maternal death rates in the world, Bloomberg dove into the numbers
and discovered that there is one doctor for every 50,000 people. Upgrading
health facilities and training non-physicians to provide emergency care
create more opportunities for Tanzanian women to get the care they need.

“There are so many other opportunities to improve lives that the world is
not effectively tracking because we don’t have that data,” he said. “If you
get the data, you can really target your resources and make a big
difference.”