From data to concerns: gender equity in higher education

“Show me the data!” is a phrase often meant as a request for “raw”
data to prove a statement. People request data to prove claims that might seem
anecdotal or lacking evidence. In these situations, data usually refers to
numbers and usually in large amounts. Even though large quantities of
systematically collected data can help create awareness or address scepticism
about the existence of a complex issue, numbers can be limited in meaningfully
addressing that same issue. In addition, the emotions, stories, experiences, and
worldviews are rendered invisible in the process of collecting and normalising
large amounts of descriptive data. In this chapter, we present our initial
attempts to use quantitative data as a starting point for eliciting concerns about
equity in higher education through data visualisations and data-objects. We
describe our interventions as part of a research project that aims to generate
debate on equity in higher education with an emphasis on gender. We focus on
gender due to data availability while keeping an intersectional perspective on
other power-mediating dimensions, such as nationality. This work adds to a
growing corpus of work on how data representations are instrumental to deal
with complex societal issues while bringing to the fore the importance of
complementing the so-called facts with situated concerns.