Ac/counting for Gender Injustice:
A Feminist Geographical Critique of the Measurement
Imperative in Global Development - Reflections from Guatemala and Peru

Lorena Fuentes, Ph.D.
Lecturer, International Development Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED

Abstract: In recent years, powerful development institutions have suggested with increasing assiduity that progress on gender equality depends upon our collective ability to close what they refer to as "the gender data gap," by which they mean that we know less about women’s lives than men’s, at least in statistical terms.

Linking the insights offered by feminist geographers to those offered by feminist scholars in critical development studies, this talk encourages us to think about the ways in which the less quantifiable aspects of women’s experiences are sidelined or rendered invisible in mainstream development discourses and programming. Approaching the gender data gap through a feminist geographical lens brings the limits of the "measurement imperative" into sharp relief.

Biography: Lorena Fuentes, Ph.D., is co-founder and principal of Ladysmith, a feminist research consultancy that helps international development organizations collect, analyze, and take action on "gender data." Lorena also serves as an advisory board member of the Justice for My Sister Collective, an organization that provides women of color and LGBTQA+ youth in Los Angeles with public arts and video production training in order to support grassroots advocacy and movement-building around gender-based violence.


Lunch will be provided with funding from the Dorothy L. Meier Chair, Cecilia Menjivar.

Thanks to support from the Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series in the Department of Sociology. The Irene Flecknoe Ross Lecture Series is made possible by a gift from Ray Ross in memory of his wife.

Sponsor(s): Gender & Sexuality and Political Sociology & Global South Working Groups of the UCLA Department of Sociology.