Not Now, But Soon: Who Is Worth Measuring?
Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.
On this episode, host Malka Older examines the stories behind statistics with Julisa Tambunan, deputy executive director of Equal Measures 2030, a global feminist coalition. Tambunan uses data to advocate for policies that center the lived experiences of women, girls, and underrepresented minorities. She explains why gender inequality is a disaster and how collecting better data—both statistics and stories—can help create a better future for everyone.
Resources
- Visit Equal Measures 2030 to learn more about achieving gender equality through data-driven advocacy.
- This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.
Transcript
Malka Older: Numbers and quantitative data may feel real, true, and more objective than narratives. But statistics themselves are stories with lots of subjective choices built in, stories about what is worth measuring, who has the power to take the measurements, and what we do with the data. Data is powerful and political, and uncovering the stories behind it and the choices it hides are essential for building better futures for everyone.
Welcome to Not Now, But Soon, a podcast miniseries about rethinking disasters. I’m Malka Older, a disaster responder, researcher, and speculative fiction author. Together we’ll expand the idea of what a disaster is and what to do about it, and imagine how we can build a more robust, resilient future for all of us. In this episode, I’m joined by Julisa Tambunan, deputy executive director at Equal Measures 2030, a global feminist coalition connecting data with advocacy and action on gender equality. Julisa, it’s so good to have you here. I’m so happy as always to talk to you.
Julisa Tambunan: Thank you for having me. It’s so humbling to be here.
Older: Can you tell us a little bit about what you do?
Tambunan: I would call myself a feminist policy strategist. Essentially, my work is advocating for policies that really center the lived experience and lived realities of people that the policy is for, so women and girls and gender minorities, LGBTQIA+ people. We’re using data to drive accountability. We can all talk about data gaps that are out there when we talk about gender equality. Data is very political. Who collects them? What’s it for? So really thinking about why only certain data exists and why can it represent the whole population. But at the same time, there’s a lot of data out there already that we can still analyze and we can still package to influence change.
My work is advocating for policies that really center the lived experience and lived realities of people that the policy is for, so women and girls and gender minorities, LGBTQIA+ people.
Older: This is such a rich area actually to be looking at because it’s talking about the way that we make or evaluate our situation in the world, and we are living in such a overwhelmingly data rich world right now. So much information. And so the question of making sure that we understand that what data is collected is political, what we know is political. And I think for a lot of people, politics and policies feel very separate to daily life, when in fact it should be very connected.
Tambunan: Yeah, I think we have to understand why policy is there to begin with, whose purpose it’s serving. So government is there to serve people, so they’re creating policies that should serve people regardless of their identities, and that’s not the case right now. But the reason why that’s not the case is because there’s not enough data to back up all of this different experience that exists in the society. So we want to basically surface all of this different experience and realities and making sure that the policies actually really addressing what it needs to address.
Older: And I think that is so powerful to just put the spotlight on those links and say that yes, this should be connected to the people that we’re talking about and then say, okay, if it’s failing, if it’s not connected, then part of that maybe is that we don’t know what those lived experiences are because nobody is asking the right questions or documenting the answers in a way that’s intelligible. I mean, I think about how much news coverage we see where the only people quoted are people who are very much outside of the group that’s being most affected.
Tambunan: That’s absolutely correct. And in the place that I work, we use data to look at how countries are progressing in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals that almost 200 countries agreed on back in 2015. So it’s driven by the UN, and we know that in order to achieve these goals, it all relies on gender equality goals. On No Poverty, for example, it really relies on everyone in this society not living under the poverty line. And so that means that men and women and boys and girls and all the people in the spectrum of gender are not living under the poverty line. But that’s not the case because when you look at the data, you don’t really desegregate it. So what we do in our organization, we’re trying to surface all of this data. When governments are looking at indicators around poverty, then we need to see, okay, how are women doing in this specific indicator?
Older: Right. Because if the government has this stated goal of we’re going to reduce the number of people living in poverty, but they only have programs that are more suited to men in that society and they help men move out of poverty, but women are still living under the poverty line, then the policies aren’t being effective for what their goal is because they don’t understand how to target them or even just think about the fact that they might need different programs for women because women might have different needs.
So part of it is that collecting data or uncovering data that exists or looking for how to desegregate the data. And then part of you said before was about how to present the data to convince people. Do you find when you’re talking to policymakers that you can just sort of say, here’s the data, maybe there’s a chart or something or that narrative part, that step from data to narrative. Is that something that’s sometimes a leap that you have to kind of build a bridge across?
Tambunan: I made it sound like it’s easy, we present the data and they change the policy. This takes years, maybe generations, and that’s why the collective action part steps in because when you have data, you built a narrative behind it, but you also have to make a strong connection why these things happen. What are the drivers presented to the policymakers? And just be persistent about it. Your policy doesn’t work or your policy does work, but only for certain groups of people. And with data, they could see that.
Obviously that really depends on the political will and what is it that motivates policymakers to change policies, but data is always a good place to start. How we present the data, how do we talk about this data is really important because some good data might be used for bad policies. So a lot of data around crimes rate have been used to create a very bad immigration policy, for example, and that’s because the narrative around this data is packaged in a way that supports these policies that don’t really benefit a lot of people.
Older: For me, one of the most infuriating false narratives is the constant attacks on immigration based on a whole range of things from criminality to economics that are not at all supported by the data, the economic data, the data on crime, all of it. It’s so frustrating to see data misused like that. Does this just make you really angry because it makes me really angry when I see stuff like this?
Data alone is not enough, and people think it is. The same data can be used different ways depending on the narrative behind it.
Tambunan: Yeah, it’s definitely creating a lot of anger with me as well. I think that’s why I started with data justice. Data alone is not enough, and people think it is. The same data can be used different ways depending on the narrative behind it. And so I think right now our homework is really to look at data and present it in a way that is beneficial for everyone.
Older: As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about what narratives do and don’t work. The stories people tell about events or choices and how they tell them can affect people’s decisions and even their entire approach to dealing with a problem. Disaster studies show us that after a naturally triggered disaster, something that can be described as nobody’s fault, communities tend to come together. But when there are questions of blame, especially if there are powerful interests like industry or the government shaping stories about who is to blame, those arguments can drive communities apart.
Stories are powerful and so are numbers. One of my favorite examples is the Sphere Handbook, a set of standards for disaster response. They help provide goals and benchmarks in the chaos. So they say things like, we need to make sure everyone has this many liters of water per day, or the latrines need to be this far from a water source, and we can use these numbers to compare different disaster response organizations and see who needs more help. But at the same time, those numbers don’t cover everything. They don’t tell us about the individual cases of people who need extra help carrying water or how people feel about their living conditions in circumstances where they’ve already lost so much. So how can quantitative data and stories come together?
Tambunan: The thing about data though, having those benchmarks that actually help us at the same time to hold government accountable. We can say to them you said you’re going to achieve these numbers and you haven’t. This is the data. It’s really good to drive accountability. So that’s why we need these numbers with stories behind it, and I think it also surveys a lot of issues and making it look more systemic. For example, we talk about femicide, the intentional killing of women. People would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s just individual. That’s just crime of passion.” There’s all these things, but when you look at the data, like 10 women in a day died because of femicide globally. So when you look at the data that way, you could see, we need to do something about this because it means that it’s systemic. It’s no longer just an isolated case here and there.
Older: The other thing I think is that a lot of times when people get numbers, they tell their own stories to protect themselves from that. So you’ll say 10 women a day globally, which is horrifying. I think a lot of people will look at that and say, “Oh, they must have been a certain kind of person,” or “They must have taken certain kind of risks and they’re different from me, and that’s why that doesn’t affect me because it’s so scary.”
Tambunan: 100%. It’s the same thing when you say one in three women experienced sexual assault. One in three. So it can’t be because this one woman act differently. It’s because it’s systemic. It’s because of the whole misogynistic system that we’re living right now in the society. It helps to also paint the whole picture and help us to understand this is what’s happening, and so numbers help that way, and then the stories behind it will give meaning to these numbers.
Older: I do want to go back for just a second. Talk about how we met. I was working in Jakarta and we were working for the same organization. We were doing communications at the time and working on disaster response when there was an earthquake in West Sumatra. Do you want to tell us how you got from communications and disaster response to the work that you’re doing now?
All of these policies have failed us because they’re not looking at the intersectional identity of the people that the policy was supposed to serve. So let’s change that. Let’s dismantle it and let’s build something better.
Tambunan: I think it’s all interconnected, right? I responded to a lot of natural disasters, to a lot of man-made disasters. That brought me to the Syrian refugee crisis where I basically worked in this protection program and I could see firsthand how important it is to have response that is needs driven, that meets the needs of different people with different identity in these refugee camps, and I could see firsthand that that’s not what happened. You have all these one size fits all responses, and I think that also goes back to why now I become a data justice activist because we don’t have the data, so let’s just surface all these things so we can make sure that we can respond to everyone needs.
Before, obviously, I did a lot of direct action. Now I work more on policies because I could see that policies are basically making changes in a more systematic way and having policies that really address different needs is really important. Otherwise, you’re only catered to 1%, and that’s why we got here, because all of these policies have failed us because they’re not looking at the intersectional identity of the people that the policy was supposed to serve. So let’s change that. Let’s dismantle it and let’s build something better.
Older: In the humanitarian context, there’s a concept called protection. It means that aid needs to protect the safety, dignity, and human rights of the affected people, effectively protecting people and their dignity means you have to understand them, what they’re afraid of, what they’re embarrassed by, when they need privacy, when they need help. I worked in Darfur on a protection program that involved building fuel-efficient stoves on the surface. Fuel efficiency seems to be about protecting the environment or providing an economic benefit, but in a humanitarian context, fuel efficiency is often key to protecting women and girls because in many areas, those are the people doing the job of collecting fuel, and it takes them into isolated areas, which can be risky in conflict zones, better fuel efficiency means they don’t need to gather as much fuel, reducing the time spent on what can be a dangerous necessity. If you haven’t segregated the data to look at what is actually happening, you won’t see the issue, and if you can’t see it, you can’t improve it.
Tambunan: It’s hard to see things from other people’s perspective, but when we ask the question, right, so, this is the program that we’re building, or this is the policy that we’re creating. Who are we leaving behind? Then we start to think about people who are not like us.
Older: I remember being very shocked when I did my dissertation in Japan after the Tohoku tsunami. There was one guy who was this actual emergency manager who said, yeah, it took us a while, but eventually we figured out we needed to have women do the needs assessments because the women we were talking to didn’t want to tell men that they needed menstruation products.
One thing that I’ve started to appreciate when we do humanitarian response, they have what’s called a cluster meeting. Everyone kind of hates cluster meetings because you have to go. It’s usually the end of a long day and you’re in some hot, sweaty office with 60 or 70 other people. You’re talking about shelter or health, and everyone’s trying to come to some kind of agreement. But one thing I came to really appreciate about it was that anytime you had one of those meetings, whatever you were talking about, there was going to be someone there from Save the Children who would say, “Okay, but how does this impact children?” And someone there from HelpAge who would be like, “Okay, but the elderly.” Someone from Oxfam who’d be like, “But gender.” One person didn’t have to keep all of the groups in mind all the time, but there were people who were dedicated to that one perspective and it was so important.
Tambunan: Yeah, that’s my experience as well with cluster meeting. Yeah. No, I can’t agree more. If you design something for the most marginalized, everyone else would benefit. I guess at the core of what I do is I’m trying to not leave people behind. I think that that brought me here.
Older: Do you feel like gender equality is a disaster?
Tambunan: 100%. It’s not talked enough as a disaster. I think when you look at the definition of disaster, Malka, you know that it’s a system collapse, widespread, it surpasses people’s ability to cope. This is all about the backlash on gender equality. It’s about gender-based violence, how the system failed, because justice system is not equipped to respond to gender-based violence. There are a lot of under-reported cases because of that. We need to name it as a disaster so we can respond to it. Yeah, there’s no question.
Older: What are the stories that we should be telling about gender equality that will help us see it for what it is?
The story that we need to start saying is that there’s no country in the world that will achieve gender equality by 2030. No one.
Tambunan: I think we need to start saying that gender equality is a systemic issue that came out of patriarchy and misogyny, and we need to call that out. It doesn’t happen sporadically. It’s intentional. I think the story that we need to start saying is that there’s no country in the world that will achieve gender equality by 2030. No one. When we say a girl that is born right now will never see gender equality until she’s a hundred years old, people will ask, does that mean that she can go to school or does that mean that she can have the same amount of money as men? I think it’s really important to bring it back that this is an intentional issue that is created by system of oppression.
Older: Can you imagine what a world with gender equality would look like?
Tambunan: For every woman to have controls over their bodies? It’s just that alone.
Older: Yeah, or even I was going to say, when you’re out having fun with your friends and needing to remember, am I safe? Can I drink this cup that I left here while I went to the bathroom, or can I walk home by myself or should I take a different route? Feeling like you’re safe in the world and in society I think would be enormous.
Tambunan: It’s amazing how much we have internalized since we were born that this is normal. It’s normal that I hold the keys between my hand when I walk alone at night. That is not normal. We need to put a stop to it. I hope that happens in my lifetime. I doubt it, but doesn’t stop me to try advocate for it.
Older: Is there anything in particular that helps you to get to that imagining, whether it’s dystopian or more on the utopian side or in between, or what do you read to help you keep working to make a better world?
Tambunan: I read a lot of queer fantasies, romance books just because to imagine a world where it’s okay to be who you are, to love who you want to love, and I love that. And there’s this book I just finished, I really enjoy it. It’s Rainbow Rowell, the Simon Snow novels. I really like it just because-
Older: Those are really fun.
Tambunan: It’s just fun to think about what’s possible. I think these things are possible, and if it’s possible in fiction, it’s possible in real life because we can imagine it. If we can imagine it, then that can happen, so let’s not stop imagining things and let’s not stop working toward that.
Older: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk. This was really fascinating. And of course, always great to chat with you.
If we can imagine it, then that can happen, so let’s not stop imagining things and let’s not stop working toward that.
Tambunan: Oh yeah, anytime. It’s a privilege to be here. I’m honored. I’m humbled. And yeah, it’s just nice to chat with you.
Older: And thank you for listening. Learn more about Julisa Tambunan’s work on data justice and gender equality by visiting equalmeasures2030.org. Visit our show notes to find links to this and more.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Angelina Mazza and our podcast producers Kimberly Quach and Mia Armstrong-López. Music for this series was created by Stuart Leach. Not Now, But Soon is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Additional editors on the Future Tense Fiction Project include Joey Eschrich, Andrés Martinez, and Ed Finn.
On the next episode, Nasir Andisha, permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations in Geneva, shares the story of what it’s like to lose his nation, but continue to advocate for his people. Subscribe to our main podcast feed by searching for “The Ongoing Transformation” wherever you get your podcasts.