Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom joined former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York Monday for a Data2X event to “promote gender-sensitive data.” Data2X is a United Nations Foundation sponsored organization that, according to its website, is:
According to the State Department, “the empowerment of women and girls a foundational goal of U.S. foreign policy,” and toward that end, the U.S. government is backing Data2X’s goal of increasing the volume of data on “health, education, economic opportunities, political participation, and human security” that is available broken down by sex. For instance, the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s (PEPFAR) newly redesigned PEPFAR Dashboards will now include data disaggregated by age and sex.” Given the disparity of the impact of AIDS between men and women in some countries, the state department believes the new data will help countries and organizations “better target their efforts to combat HIV/AIDS and increase accountability for achieving results.”
The State Department says that “the U.S. government strongly believes that advancing gender equality is among the most transformative goals the globe can set,” and hopes that this “data driven approach” will “lead to dramatic improvements in gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls by 2030.”
Given the State Department’s recent emphasis on the transgendered under Secretary John Kerry, the absence of any reference to that group was noticeable. By contrast, “women and girls” appears six times in the State Department’s Media Note about the event. Currently, there is no reference to “transgender” on the Data2X website.
