Hello everyone! Like many others, this week I thought a lot about the status of the #blacklivesmatter in Switzerland. Yesterday a friend asked me which data sets relevant to this topic are available in Switzerland and unfortunately, I didn’t know. Do you have any links, ideas or tips? Thanks in advance for your support!
Here’s a newsletter from ODI pointing out a few global data analyses around this topic:
** As protests continue in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, and people around the world try to understand the underlying issues of racism and inhumanity that it illuminates, The Economist uses data to evidence inequality, citing the ‘profound economic, health and judicial disparities [that] help explain the fury’.
At all times, but perhaps even more so during crises, data has a significant role to play in raising awareness of inequality and it can help people to understand issues more deeply. For example, in the UK, a government-commissioned review has shown that Black Asian and Minority (BAME) groups are up to 50% more likely to die from Covid-19, with people of Bangladeshi ethnicity twice as likely to die from the disease than their white British counterparts.
And if you thought that machines might do better at tackling unequal or unfair treatment and unequal outcomes, the Ada Lovelace Institute’s Director, Carly Kind warned against relying on algorithms when the data that feeds them is inherently unrepresentative. She said in an interview for Raconteur that potential biases in facial and voice recognition technologies can originate ‚from unrepresentative datasets and this may be because the developer of the technology hasn’t ensured there is a proper representation of ethnicities, genders or social classes.‘
This and many other related topics, including diversity in tech, could well be on the agenda later (Friday 5 June at 6pm) when a group of BAME technology leaders, colleagues and friends meet for an open discussion about how to mobilise and ally against racial inequality. It’s organised by Your Startup, Your Story (YSYS).**