Women’s rights icon Anita Hill advocates for the use of data — how it’s used, why it’s important and why Americans must insist the government use it to inform policy.
“Data can be everything,” Hill said. “Numbers are increasingly critical indicators of fairness in justice — including in civil rights cases and especially in employment cases.”
Hill spoke to a room full of University of Idaho students, faculty, staff and Moscow community members at the Sherman J. Bellwood Lecture last Wednesday about the importance of data and her personal experience in sexual harassment cases in the early ‘90s.
Hill began her battle toward gender equality in October 1991, when she first testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and accused then-Supreme Court Justice nominee, Clarence Thomas, whom Hill worked for years prior at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.
Despite Hill’s testimony, Thomas was confirmed a position on the Supreme Court.
Now, working as a university professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University 26 years later, Hill advocates for numbers and their importance in identifying gender-based issues.
Hill, who emphasized the U.S. is moving toward a “quickly evolving post-fact era,” said numbers formulate a basis for policy making and change.
Relevant data, which leads to a better understanding of inequalities in the nation, must be collected to confront pay gaps, and gender and racial inequality, she said.
In 2014, the Obama Administration reached an agreement with industry leaders, with hundreds of companies pledging to collect information on pay based on gender and race, she said. The idea of this was to make it easier for companies and their employees to identify pay gaps.
“The gender pay gap in particular is something we have been considered for decades now,” Hill said. “We have never been able to close that pay gap and there is a lot of disagreement about why the pay gap exists.”
Last month, Hill said the Trump Administration released all businesses from the pledge, which can now be found only in the Obama archives.
“The commitment itself is gone,” Hill said.
This began Hill’s search for more information being removed, which indicated data related to sexual assault and LGBTQA rights on the White House website had been moved to the Obama archives.
“Where the concern is equal pay, LGBT equality or sexual assault, our government seems to have delayed at best — or worse abandoned — encouraging and gathering and showcasing the
formation necessary for us to challenge bias,” Hill said.
Hill said she believes it will remain an ongoing pattern as the White House continues to scrub their website of relevant data.
“As a researcher — as an academic, I know the importance of having that data available,” Hill said.
Data is a key factor for lawyers to determine if policy needs repair, she said. It also allows Americans to hold the government accountable — to address the government and challenge policies being made.
“What we care about, we measure,” Hill said.
Even with lack of transparency in terms of information collected to establish the status of women and girls in the country, Hill said there is a silver lining.
“That silver lining is us,” Hill said. “That silver lining is the fact that we are now at a point in time where we are more educated and where data is more available and where we can use our resources and skills to do analysis and provide information on our own.”
Savannah Cardon can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @savannahlcardon