Interview with Ivana Feldfeber
is a feminist activist, One Young World ambassador, and the co-founder and executive directors of Data Género–the first gender-data observatory in Latin America. Our EAAMO Bridges working group,, had the pleasure of interviewing Ivana in February 2024. In this blog post, we record the main insights from the interview for our audience of researchers.
Addressing the digital divide from the classroom
Digital illiteracy and, by extension, the digital divide remain pressing social issues across the globe, despite the pervasive digitalization of many aspects of society. Consequently, these issues give way to new power dynamics and social inequalities that materialize in different ways and are invisible or ignored in a discourse about a future that revolves around a technological utopia.
For Ivana, the reality of the digital divide became evident when she was teaching about gender-based violence across different schools located in disadvantaged areas of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She noticed a skill gap that was disenfranchising a sub-segment of the population:
“I started to get involved in technology because I wanted to teach the women I was working with to use computers and to have them learn all the things they needed to be part of the world because they were outside of that. They were 50, 60-year-old women that were just finishing [high] school because they were working their whole lives.”
From this experience, Ivana’s interest grew to further develop her own technological skills and to continue passing them on by teaching others how to use these tools for their own empowerment:
“I started teaching teachers how to put technology in the classrooms. Then I started to learn how to teach programming to kids and teenagers. So that’s how I got into coding by teaching.”
Co-creating a space for data with a gendered perspective
Beyond her role as a teacher, Ivana has identified as a feminist since a young age. During her journey teaching programming to children, she had the opportunity to delve deeper into the prospective intersection of gender and data in a Latin American context.
“I wanted to see if these two words were connected somehow […] I knew that in the United States, Catherine D’Ignazio was working with the MIT on data feminism. But if you searched in Google for ‘datos con perspectiva de género’, ‘gendered data’, or ‘gender perspective in data’, you couldn’t find anything in Spanish. And that’s why I decided to create something with the people I knew that were interested. I saw a gap in our region.”
“I wanted to go beyond [how to code and how to use machine learning] and see how these tools could help feminism to get more empowered and to create better data for us to fight with.”
With this idea in mind, Ivana set out to look for like-minded collaborators to create what is now , a data observatory. DataGénero is guided by feminist and trans-feminist values and strives to start dialogues with governments and companies.
Moreover, Ivana explained to us what the role and the importance of such an observatory is, especially in the context of a growing social distrust in institutions, misinformation proliferation, and cost-cutting initiatives targeting social programs by central governments:
“What we are trying to achieve is to measure the inequalities that exist, because there are a lot of [inequalities]. So I know that we know that data is not objective, and it’s not the truth of anything. But if we have better data about how women get, for example, paid less than men in the same position, or how we suffer different kinds of violences, or the access to health or to the economy or to education, if we can measure those inequalities, we have something to work with, because they [the government] are telling it’s a lie. And we shouldn’t put money into solving these issues with public policy. So what we’re trying to do is to help governments create better data, to have better policies, and to assess them in this process, but also safeguard the data that we have and use it with the feminist movements to demand and to make these issues visible.”
On harnessing support from key stakeholders
Following the launch of DataGénero, Ivana discussed the many steps involved in making DataGénero a sustainable project. On the one hand, she addressed the ups-and-downs of acquiring funding, and how it is crucial to find funding parties that do not dictate a research agenda nor compromise the Observatory’s core values. This can sometimes mean that the scope of action is constrained to the limited but available funding opportunities. On the other hand, she commented on the importance of managing the relationships that emerge from collaborations, especially when it comes to liaising with local governments, since having just one person on your side can create opportunities to make yourself be heard:
“I think that it’s really important to find some allies […]. Usually they are male because it’s a really male dominated space, but they will open some doors, so we can start to create these changes inside the government.”
“We have [communication with] one judge that is […] always really welcoming to all the things we want to try in the criminal court. So because of the judge’s openness to this [cause], we could create an AI tool, and we’re working to create better data inside the criminal court regarding gender based violence and that small experience in one criminal court of the 31 criminal courts in the city of Buenos Aires. So it’s a really small sample. It’s not representative at all. But from that experience, we can go international and say, we are doing this. And when you go international, the people in your country start saying that work we do is interesting, because they saw it in the UN or somewhere else. We should open the doors, too.”
Moreover, Ivana discussed with us the importance of how finding the right collaborators is key for the growth of DataGénero and for the social impact of their initiatives:
“We are working with people from academia, we are working with other activists and civic society organizations that are helping us in development and with cooperatives that are building technology. […] We make alliances with other organizations that know what they are talking about regarding, for example, sexual reproductive rights or legislative staff. So we partner with people that are experts in their domain, so we don’t have to learn everything from scratch because it will be exhausting and impossible.”
Building high-impact technological tools to target real-world problems
“Not because everything has to be with technology, but sometimes technology can help the activists in the field. […] We don’t want to create any more chatbots. We are kind of tired of that. But we want to see how we can help with data on these issues.”
DataGénero has a bustling agenda made up of projects that concentrate the efforts of its expanding network on raising awareness of gender and its complex sociality. This network is made up of people coming from different walks of life and disciplinary backgrounds, and holding varied skill sets. Ivana shared with us some of the projects being undertaken by the observatory, such as discerning types of gender-based violence in court documents, monitoring gender parity in political elections, and training initiatives to improve data collection practices from vulnerable populations.
Ivana touched upon the hardships of dealing with government officials, public information requests, and heterogeneous census processes across Argentina, and how that sometimes means a roadblock for their ongoing initiatives:
“To monitor how many same-sex marriages were conducted from the sanction of the law in 2010 to nowadays, we had to ask the 23 provinces for the data sets of the civil courts, and most of them didn’t have them or never responded or replied to our request. And it’s a law that you should reply to our request for public information. But they didn’t care. Provinces weren’t collecting the data […] so we didn’t know. We have 300 marriages in one year. But what about same-sex marriages? They [government representatives in the provinces] don’t count that. So, we hit a wall.”
In partnership with their collaborators, DataGénero secured public funding to build and deploy a tool called . This tool, which takes its name from a Quechua word, is included in UNESCO’s global toolkit on AI and the rule of law. The toolkit aims to provide a better understanding of the use of AI in the administration of justice and its wider legal implications on societies.
At a practical level, AymurAI is deployed in Argentinian local criminal courts and is helping to change the public perception of open data projects in the context of criminal courts. The experience of building the tool has taught the team at DataGénero to manage their resources and build tools that account for the limitations of real-world settings while overseeing best practices.
“Most criminal courts in Argentina have really outdated computers. They don’t have great processing power, and sometimes they don’t have a stable Internet connection. So we needed to find a way to create something that can run locally and wouldn’t need to connect to any server.”
Ivana’s parting words of advice for people wanting to engage on issues relating to social justice were to find like-minded individuals that are willing to fight with you for a common cause. This is especially important in the context of male-dominated spaces, political agitation, and ongoing humanitarian crises:
“More data is not the solution to anything. And what I say to all the young girls or queer people that are working on these issues, is to get together and create safe spaces for yourself. Because sometimes studying in those places can be really violent for a lot of people.”
“Look for women that went through the same issues because you are not the only one. And what they are trying to make us feel is that we are alone. This only happens to us, and it’s not true. […] Create your own organization or movement that will make you feel part of something that’s not only happening to you.”
We thank Ivana for her insightful and inspiring conversation with our Conversations with Practitioners working group.
This interview with Ivana was led by .
This blog was written by Mayra Russo and edited by and .
We would again like to thank Ivana for sharing insights, challenges, and obstacles observed in Data Género with the community.
