Book summary “Data Feminism”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world driven by data that pretends to be neutral, objective, and universal. Yet the metrics, algorithms, and models shaping your life routinely reinforce historical inequalities and hide the perspectives of marginalized groups. When you accept mainstream data science as an infallible mirror of reality, you ignore the power relations embedded in every dataset and model.

Data feminism offers a corrective framework rooted in intersectional theory and feminist activism. Catherine D’Ignazio argues that data science must learn from decades of feminist thought to challenge existing hierarchies and redistribute power. You will discover how structural inequality infects data systems from collection to analysis.

The following chapters explore how communities build counterdata to resist state silence and transform social structures. You will examine the principles that guide ethical data practices, honoring emotional labor and prioritizing community care.

• How do traditional data systems conceal systemic violence?
• What methods do grassroots activists use to build counterdata?
• Why must you reevaluate the politics of quantification?

1. A Short Genealogy of Feminicide and Data Activism

Fatal violence against women is often treated as a private tragedy rather than a public crisis. Diana Russell and Jill Radford defined femicide in 1992 as the misogynist killing of women by men, highlighting crimes motivated by gender subordination. In 1801, the term appeared in English for the first time. Diana Russell testified about these crimes at the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976.

Grassroots activists trace fatal violence against women from private tragedies to systemic phenomena, laying the groundwork for modern counterdata production.

In Mexico, Julia Monárrez Fragoso and Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos expanded the term to feminicidio. This broader concept incorporates state impunity, institutional failure, and intersectional oppressive factors such as classism and racism. In 2015, activist Marcela Ojeda tweeted THEY ARE KILLING US, sparking the #NiUnMenos uprising across Argentina and over 120 cities against gendered violence.

Femicide to Feminicidio to Feminicide

Early antifeminicide activism in Ciudad Juárez utilized physical record-keeping and community archives to document murders when official data was absent or neglected. Following NAFTA, homicide rates for women in Juárez surged disproportionately compared to men. From 1994 to 2001, the homicide rate for men in Juárez increased by 300 percent. During the same period, the homicide rate for women in Juárez increased by 600 percent. Between 1993 and 2007, intimate partner violence accounted for a minimum share of 30 percent of murders in Juárez.

Esther Chávez Cano saved physical news files in Juárez, clipping newspaper articles and obituaries. She founded Casa Amiga and cofounded Grupo 8 de Marzo, which laid the groundwork for grassroots data collection and coalitions like Ni una más. The 1999 book El Silencio Que La Voz de Todas Quiebra analyzed deaths and disappearances between 1993 and 1998.

Indigenous and Intersectional Activism

The Combahee River Collective documented the murders of Black women and girls in Boston, refusing a single-axis analysis that separated racism from sexism. Their counting functioned not merely to produce a single comprehensive tally, but to initiate community defense and highlight systemic oppression. The Combahee River Collective published the 1979 pamphlet Eleven Black Women: Why Did They Die?, distributing over 18,000 copies in Spanish and English. The final draft count documented 11 murdered Black women.

Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics examines who is targeted for death and how certain deaths are normalized by the state. Scholars like Shatema Threadcraft apply this to Black femicide and the #SayHerName campaign, noting the challenge that Black women suffer from a violent death deficit in public spectacles compared to men. In 1895, Ida B. Wells published The Red Record, collecting reports of Black lynchings to challenge white press narratives.

Indigenous scholars and activists connect the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people to resource extraction, state sovereignty, and colonial violence. Concepts like cuerpo-territorio link violence on the body to violence on the land, as activists face data terrorism and institutional erasure. The annual Women's Memorial March has been held in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside every February 14 since 1991, adding over 970 names to its list, with 75 names added to the list in the year 2019 alone.

Supranational protocols and civil society initiatives attempt to standardize government data collection to overcome institutional fragmentation and missing data. Organizations like the Latin American Initiative for Open Data developed guides and flowcharts with recommended variables to help public agencies register femicide cases consistently. The UN Latin American Model Protocol technical guidance document contains 200 pages. ILDA piloted data standard workshops in Argentina and Uruguay, producing a 15-page guide containing 66 recommended variables for public agencies. Despite such technical frameworks, bureaucratic hurdles, austerity, and lack of staff training continue to impede reliable official reporting.

You can follow specific protocols when dealing with these cases:

• identify a crime as femicide using official registration flowcharts;
• collect recommended variables such as perpetrator-victim relationship and prior complaints;
• conduct a quarterly review of all registered cases;
• conduct an annual review of all registered cases;
• unify the results across government branches.

2. Official Data, Missing Data, Counterdata

Official institutions systematically fail to record marginalized deaths, forcing communities to build counterdata systems that expose state silence.

Missing data is not an accidental oversight but an actively produced social phenomenon.

Scholars call this agnotology, where dominant groups use willful ignorance to maintain power. You can see this in missing datasets that hide minoritized experiences from public view. Patricia Hill Collins explains that this invisibility operates across four distinct domains:

• the structural domain of laws and policies;
• the disciplinary domain of state agencies;
• the hegemonic domain of culture and media;
• the interpersonal domain of direct violence.

In Puerto Rico, a report titled The Persistence of Indolence exposed severe gaps in official record-keeping. Researchers compared news records and death registries with police files. They found that police data missed between 11 percent and 27 percent of feminicide victims in any given year.

Grassroots activists step in to build reliable databases when the state looks away.

Retired social worker Carmen Castelló monitored news sources from small towns and villages out of a San Juan senior living facility while caring for her grandniece, eventually producing the most reliable data on feminicide in Puerto Rico. You can follow specific steps when building such grassroots databases:

• monitor news sources daily for details about each case of violence;
• log each case into a digital document, carefully noting information sources;
• publish cases and updates on a dedicated social media page;
• compile separate databases for related issues like sexual abuse and missing women.

Data activists use triangulation to verify cases and expose state undercounting. Researchers triangulating Castelló's data, news reports, and the federal demographic registry for 2014 through 2018 found 156 matching cases, 68 noted only in news, and 33 found exclusively in the demographic registry. This counterdata work led the governor of Puerto Rico to sign Senate Bill PS 130 into law in August 2021, legally defining feminicide and transfeminicide.

Yet activists warn against the uncritical fetishization of counting. The New York Times published 19 articles mentioning Gabby Petito from September 2021 to the book's writing, compared to only 18 articles mentioning missing and murdered Indigenous women over all time. Marginalized groups may choose a politics of refusal to protect sacred knowledge from extractive state systems. Restorative and transformative data science responds by framing information work around the twin goals of repairing harm and dismantling structural conditions. The Data Against Feminicide team cataloged over 180 grassroots feminicide monitoring projects across twenty-six countries in the Americas.

3. Resolving Feminicide

Grassroots monitoring projects begin with the resolving stage. Activists and journalists determine to count cases of gender-related violence by grounding their work in a rigorous analysis of structural power and a theory of change.

Data monitoring projects begin by confronting structural power and transforming personal trauma into public political action.

Data activists find that existing state and media responses are inadequate, discriminatory, and prone to victim-blaming. They build data monitoring projects to analyze underlying social inequalities such as poverty, militarization, and neoliberalism rather than treating violence as isolated events.

Red Feminista Antimilitarista in Medellín spent years reading theorists like Rita Segato and Verónica Gago before publishing their 2014 report on neoliberal feminicidal violence.

From the Personal to the Political

Counterdata collection acts as a scalar transmutation that moves gender-related violence from the private and personal realm into the public and political realm.

Drawing on the feminist tradition of consciousness-raising groups, documenting individual cases in painstaking detail helps break the privatization and shame of structural problems. You frame them as public issues that demand collective political action and social reparation.

The Combahee River Collective and activist Carole Hanisch popularized the saying "the personal is political" through small-group dialogues about stigmatized issues.

Charismatic Counterdata

Feminicide serves as charismatic data, acting as a tractable, high-visibility measurement that functions as a gateway to discuss less visible, everyday forms of gender-related violence.

Using the feminist metaphor of an iceberg or a continuum of violence, activists focus their counting efforts on extreme fatal outcomes to gather public attention and open dialogue about structural roots and preceding forms of misogyny, harassment, and economic violence.

María Florencia Alcaraz explained that the hashtag #NiUnMenos demands an end to all forms of oppression, ranging from femicides to unpaid work and street harassment.

4. Researching Cases

Researching is the second and most time-consuming stage of a restorative data science project. You spend months on the active search, discovery, and verification of individual cases of feminicide.

Uncovering missing data requires navigating jurisdictional mazes, leveraging local information ecosystems, and performing extensive emotional labor.

Mumalá in Argentina established a federated observatory across twenty-four provinces to monitor local cases after losing their centralized database in 2018.

State and Media Gaps

Activists counter state-level legislative gaps and poor implementation by adopting structural definitions of violence and utilizing nonstate information sources. You must review nonstate records when official sources fail.

• Include cases based on structural analysis of power
• Count people that are excluded by present laws, including LGBTQ+, children, Indigenous people not recognized by state
• Use nonstate information sources
• Manually review state websites, state social media feeds, state-run WhatsApp groups
• Search court records
• Follow up on individual misclassification/suicide cases, especially where family and community are contesting state ruling
• Triangulate state records with media reports to see what is conflicting
• Visit morgues and medical examiners
• Work in networks and coalitions to discover cases and share information
• Solicit/receive crowdsourced reports of cases
• Use federated media monitoring structure to cover large territories
• Use media sources—TV, radio, print, digital—to discover cases
• Use other citizen-led databases

The Sovereign Bodies Institute found through official scans in California that 91 percent of missing Native girls are missing from at least one official database. Furthermore, 56 percent of those recorded are classified under the wrong race.

While mainstream media help you discover cases, you must reject toxic framing.

• Use stigmatizing language to search for cases in media, but reject their framing
• Seek cases from hyperlocal and regional news outlets and blogs
• Use social media and private groups to find and validate cases outside mainstream media
• Use networks and partnerships to confirm details and verify information
• Collect humanizing information
• Follow individual cases through judicial system

Informatic Resistance and Care Work

Families provide crucial records, but you must approach them with extreme care.

• Partner and share info with groups that provide services to families
• Wait for families/communities to contact activists directly to request inclusion or share details
• Get individual case files from families, friends, or state leaks
• Contact families directly to verify information or offer support/services

La Casa del Encuentro was founded in 2008 because the family of Adriana Marisel Zambrano, an Indigenous woman in Argentina, could not get attention from the judicial system.

The Sovereign Bodies Institute refused federal requests from the FBI and DOJ to access their database because the government failed to provide transparent official data. Federal prosecutors decline 70 percent of cases in Indian Country that involve sexual assaults.

The research work of documenting feminicide demands extensive emotional and mental labor, which is strategically obscured behind the clean, objective grid of the spreadsheet.

Helena Suárez Val maintains an open, simple spreadsheet for Feminicidio Uruguay that lists factual case rows while omitting the emotional weight of geolocating violence near her apartment. Activists can spend a maximum of 2 to 3 hours reading about feminicides daily before it impacts their health.

Hegemonic data science masculinizes high-status modeling while undervaluing data curation. The AI Now report in 2018 showed that women comprised only 15 percent of AI research staff at Facebook and 10 percent at Google.

5. Recording Cases

Recording is the active process of transforming unstructured information into structured data. You organize cases into rows, values into columns, and apply categories to detect patterns of violence.

Activists operationalize numeropolitics by structuring databases as memorials and maintaining dynamic schemata that honor individual lives.

Structuring Data

Activists continuously move between researching cases, verifying information, and recording values. A data schema consists of the column names in a spreadsheet where each row corresponds to a single case.

The Alianza Feminista in Ecuador started its spreadsheet in 2017 with just four columns: date, age, name, and province. They sourced cases primarily from media, official statistics, and handwritten ledgers.

Activist data schemata are dynamic and constantly expand as groups learn, identify new forms of violence, and incorporate intersectional perspectives. As groups understand how certain subgroups are under-registered, they add variables such as gender identity, ethnicity, sexual assault, and perpetrator background. This pushes the state to expand its legal definitions.

The Alianza database expanded from four variables in 2017 to eighty variables by 2023. This expansion allowed them to analyze and map deaths of Afroecuatorian, Indigenous, and trans women.

The Practical Politics of Columns and Categories

Activists operationalize numeropolitics by deploying quantitative methods as a practical political tool to challenge hegemonic state silence and amplify subjugated knowledge. By borrowing the epistemic authority and formal language of quantitative disciplines, you practice strategic datafication to make structural violence visible while rejecting the false neutrality of hegemonic data science.

Télia Negrão of Lupa Feminista in Brazil noted that despite critiquing scientific neutrality, they had to build reliable instruments to become bearers of their own narratives.

Unlike judicial systems that attempt to classify cases based on individual perpetrator intent, activists classify cases using broader socioeconomic and cultural scenarios. Because individual motives are difficult to ascertain outside case files, activists look for common identifying factors rooted in unequal power relations that generate dynamics of overt violence.

Groups utilize the framework of scenarios proposed by Montserrat Sagot Rodríguez and Ana Carcedo Cabañas to ascribe the modus operandi to the societal context rather than just the killer.

Counterdata spreadsheets and databases function as memorials and sacred spaces of radical empathy that honor individual lives rather than mere abstractions. Activists make careful design choices in naming fields and curating non-stigmatizing photographs to embody a feminist ethics of care and refuse the reduction of victims to a cold victim-victimizer binary.

Dawn Wilcox of Women Count USA spends hours searching for and retouching non-stigmatizing photos of killed women and uses possessive pronouns like her name and her age in database fields.

Transformative data science scales through relational infrastructure and harmonization rather than rigid standardization and top-down imposition. Rather than forcing a uniform framework, networks co-construct definitions and methodologies through ongoing dialogue, respecting local context, multiplicity, and divergence.

Facilitated by MundoSur, the Red Latinoamericana contra la Violencia de Género coordinates over thirty-five member organizations, holding collaborative technical capacity-building sessions and sharing data monthly.

6. Refusing and Using Data

Grassroots groups mobilize counterdata across five distinct functional themes to refuse feminicide and shift power in society.

Data activists circulate their data to accomplish five goals: repair families and communities, remember individual lives lost, reframe structural issues in media and culture, reform state policies and laws, and revolt through large-scale public demonstrations. You witness this work operating under an epistemological ambiguity. You continuously quantify and aggregate figures while refusing the reduction of human lives to mere numbers.

Repair and Remember

Data activists use counterdata to provide direct support, care, and emotional repair to families and communities affected by feminicide. The Brazilian data journalism project Uma por Uma compiled records on every woman killed in Pernambuco in 2018 while securing state protection for threatened families and offering dignified storytelling. Over thirty women journalists working for NE10 compiled a database in Pernambuco in 2018. Thirty-six of forty-one groups interviewed do not openly publish raw databases to avoid exposing victim identities.

Activists use counterdata for public commemoration to establish an ethics of nonerasure and challenge the state-sanctioned silence surrounding gender-related violence. Textile artists Alejandra García and Marby Blanco coordinated Cortar el hilo in Uruguay, where participants embroidered victims' names onto linen pieces that were sewn into a thirty-foot scroll displayed in a public plaza. Twenty-seven participating artists embroidered names for Cortar el hilo in Uruguay. A nearly 100-meter-long memorial was created by Red Chilena contra la Violencia hacia las Mujeres.

Reframe, Reform, and Revolt

Data activists leverage quantitative evidence and storytelling to reframe public conversations and challenge mainstream media bias. Agencia Presentes published a journalistic map of hate crimes against LGBT people in Argentina and a viral comic explaining the historic travesticidio legal ruling in the murder of Diana Sacayán. Five LGBTI+ activists collaborated to define data fields for Agencia Presentes's 2019 map.

Activists use counterdata to pressure the state for institutional reform, secure a seat at policy tables, and alter official measurement practices. Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres compiled morgue and police data on femicides in Guatemala from 1996 onward, successfully lobbying the government to establish forensic institutes and specialized penal codes. The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from 1960 through 1996. The Guatemalan government established INACIF in 2006 following activist pressure.

Activists stage spectacular public revolts using counterdata to reclaim public space and visually demand political accountability. Colectiva SJF collaborated with Data Cívica in Mexico City to stencil the names of hundreds of feminicide victims onto the concrete of the Zócalo plaza on International Women's Day 2020. Ten women started stenciling names early on International Women's Day 2020, joined by over two hundred more painters. Mujeres de Negro Rosario placed 250 empty chairs outside the provincial court building in 2021.

10 Key Ideas

1. Grassroots activists trace fatal violence against women from private tragedies to systemic phenomena, laying the groundwork for modern counterdata production.
2. Missing data is not an accidental oversight but an actively produced social phenomenon.
3. Data monitoring projects begin by confronting structural power and transforming personal trauma into public political action.
4. Uncovering missing data requires navigating jurisdictional mazes, leveraging local information ecosystems, and performing extensive emotional labor.
5. The research work of documenting feminicide demands extensive emotional and mental labor, which is strategically obscured behind the clean, objective grid of the spreadsheet.
6. Activists operationalize numeropolitics by structuring databases as memorials and maintaining dynamic schemata that honor individual lives.
7. Grassroots groups mobilize counterdata across five distinct functional themes to refuse feminicide and shift power in society.
8. Data activists use counterdata to provide direct support, care, and emotional repair to families and communities affected by feminicide.
9. Activists use counterdata for public commemoration to establish an ethics of nonerasure and challenge the state-sanctioned silence surrounding gender-related violence.
10. Activists stage spectacular public revolts using counterdata to reclaim public space and visually demand political accountability.