Melinda Gates is enormously wealthy. She is a philanthropist who does good works. She commands attention. She is a role model for women. She also said, not all that long ago in a Time magazine video, that she “originally thought that women’s issues were the soft issues. And I was just wrong about that.”

Gates is co-chair, with Canadian ambassador to France Isabelle Hudon, of the Gender Equality Advisory Council, created by the Trudeau government as a foundation stone of this country’s G7 presidency being held in early June in Charlevoix, Que.

Trudeau is making a big splash about this, pushing gender equality across not just the obvious themes (economic empowerment), but through a gender-lensed approach to climate change and national security, to name just two.

Gender equality has not previously shared G7 centre stage to this degree. The advisory council has the considerable mandate of working to ensure that gender equality and gender-based analysis “are integrated across all themes, activities and outcomes of Canada’s G7 presidency.”

It is the pervasiveness of gender equality that Trudeau hopes will make this year’s G7 summit not only distinctly “us,” but will travel thematically to future G7s. Think of it as a legacy initiative.

We are used to this language here at home. The government’s focus on gender-responsive budgeting last February comes to mind. And with each initiative it is important to point out what a poor job Canada has been doing not only in the lofty corporate realm (the representation of women on boards), how slow we have been to act (the gender pay gap) and how lousy we are at simply digging out the facts. I have previously made mention of an IMF survey of G7 and non-G7 nations that have adopted gender budgeting, by example. Canada rated only a “limited application” grade across such measures as “existence of fiscal data disaggregated by gender” and “specific arrangements for co-ordinating policy decisions on gender related issues.” We have much work to do. And data and measurement should come first.

There are signals that Gates will be the right person for the task.

In a “branded content” feature in the New York Times — paid-for content, in other words — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation published a long feature on the imperative of closing the gender data gap. Quoting United Nations Foundation senior fellow Mayra Buvinic, the piece drives home the point that you can’t define policies and measure progress without data as a starting point. “Not having data on a certain area, behaviour or society means that you cannot design the right policies, you cannot track progress, you cannot evaluate,” Buvinic said. “You are basically not accountable.”

Buvinic is frequently featured as the spokesperson for Data2X, an initiative of the UN Foundation working with academia and the private sector to promote “expanded and unbiased gender data collection.” Data2X seeks nothing less than a gender data revolution. A common refrain from the group: “Without data equality, there is no gender equality.”

As the Gates-sponsored New York Times piece pointed out, the data gap often starts early. “Barriers to birth registrations can impede mobility later, as well as access to health care and other essential services for mothers and children. The gap continues with male-biased surveys that fail to capture women’s perspectives, their needs and their economic value.” Without accurate global data, the piece continues, “there’s no way to measure progress toward achieving the goals for gender equality and the global ambition to ‘leave no one behind.’”

Two years ago, the Gates Foundation, Data2X and Global Affairs Canada were among the signatories supporting the acceleration toward gender equality through a UN resolution that specifically underscored the critical importance of gathering “high quality, comparable and regular gender- and age-disaggregated statistics.” It is gender data that will point out disparities, the resolution found. “Good gender data provides the much-needed detail on the disparities that exist between men and women and boys and girls, addresses the existing gaps of inequality, and measures the impact of policy and programmatic interventions.”

The bottom line: “gender data holds power to make the invisible, visible and actionable.”

That resolution, by the way, was launched at the Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen. Canada plays host to the 2019 Women Deliver conference next spring, in Vancouver.

Prime Minister Trudeau desperately wants to be make his mark with equality. We know that. But he would be wise at this juncture to let Gates take at least some of the spotlight.

In March, the Gates Foundation announced it will spend $170 million (U.S.) over the next four years to help women exercise their economic power. In a piece for Quartz, Melinda Gates described this initiative as a new focus. “We’ve been investing in women’s health for a long time and seen significant progress. But as I spend more time visiting communities and meeting people around the world, I am convinced that we’ll never reach our goals if we don’t also address the systemic way that women and girls are undervalued.”

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The details on that lie in the data. Let’s just hope that as the advisory council makes its recommendations, that the data imperative prevails.

jenwells@thestar.ca

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