Data advocates
with Caren Grown

In today’s increasingly digital and AI-driven world, data – and how it is collected, categorised, analysed, and used – plays a vital role in promoting equity, justice, and visibility for the most vulnerable groups within societies. But what happens when governments decide to manipulate this information, or to obscure it, erase it, or stop collecting it altogether? This is precisely what has been happening in the United States, where the Trump administration has recently taken steps to dismantle key demographic and health surveys.

We spoke with Caren Grown, senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank conducting research on public policy and governance at local, national, and global levels.

Widely recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on gender and development, Grown served from 2014 to 2021 as global director for gender at the World Bank Group. In her current role at Brookings, her work focuses on climate change and development through a gender lens, as well as fiscal policy and public finance for gender equality. She was also one of the featured speakers at the 2025 Annual Conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), held July 3-5 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

This year’s conference theme centered on social justice through solidarity, and how it can be cultivated within feminist economics. Caren Grown took part in the opening plenary session, which explored the meaning of solidarity today and the pathways it might take in the future.

Over the past six months, the current administration has systematically dismantled the architecture for development assistance, including terminating the DHS programme. In February, the Demographic and Health Surveys, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), were formally notified of their termination. Could you shed some light on the implications of this loss for feminist research, and what it means for development, feminist economists, and IAFFE more broadly?

The good news is that over the summer several funders and host countries jumped in to fill part of the funding vacuum, and ICF, the organisation that hosts the DHS, secured interim funding to continue some of the DHS programme services, including completion of selected surveys. They can also continue to maintain the DHS website, continued free access to tolls and data, including uploading of and access to new datasets. Access to the data archive and the learning hub also continues. While this is terrific news, it exposed serious weaknesses in the global survey architecture.

What is the DHS programme and why it is so important for low- and low-middle income countries, the public health community, economists and demographers, and feminists?

The DHS was launched in 1984 and expanded over time to collect nationally representative and open-source data on a wide range of topics, including childhood and maternal mortality, child health, nutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, anaemia, and education among others. Questions on spousal violence were added in 1990, followed by a full experimental module on women’s lives and experiences in 1994, and a module to collect information on men’s health, attitudes and behaviours in the late 1990s. These surveys became more consistently collected across countries from about 2000 onwards. The data opened up a new field of research on issues such as women’s empowerment and decision-making, employment and health status, fertility choices, and men’s attitudes on these issues.  

What are the consequences of the termination of the programme?

The termination of the DHS programme had several consequences, including stopping data collection efforts that were in the field, the provision of technical assistance to country statistical offices and data users, and halting all new activity. As I noted, while some of these activities were restored, not everything was. The programme’s termination exposed the weakness in relying on one major donor, and it created uncertainty about the future of demographic and health surveys and regular monitoring of vulnerable populations, especially in low-income countries. It also raised questions about the governance architecture for global survey data. 

As you already mentioned, the DHS surveys opened up critical new fields of feminist research – on women’s empowerment, men’s attitudes, fertility decisions, health, and much more – thanks to decades of consistent, open-source data collection. 

When I spoke about the loss of the DHS at the IAFFE conference in July, I asked to see a show of hands of those who had used the DHS. Over half the participants raised their hands. And then I asked how many came from countries where the DHS was terminated, and it was about a third of participants. This shows the value of this data for economists and demographers who work on the determinants of female empowerment and the relationship between empowerment and asset ownership, contraceptive use, HIV prevalence, maternal and child nutrition status, and men’s involvement in antenatal care in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and other regions across the world. Countless PhD students have used the DHS in their dissertations and continue to rely on it throughout their research careers. The DHS was a platform to test different approaches to measurement, for instance on how to carry out qualitative research on women’s agency, consent or coercion in their experience of first sex.

What is the added value of DHS data?

The DHS are both national and international public goods. The surveys underlay policy monitoring and evaluation efforts globally. For instance, DHS data are used to calculate 33 of the indicators supporting the Sustainable Development Goals, endorsed by all governments around the world in 2015. One SDG indicator – SDG Indicator 5.6.1 on the proportion of women age 15-49 who make their own informed decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use, and reproductive health care – is a composite scale of three DHS survey items.

With the abrupt termination of the programme and disruption across 18 countries, what specific gaps do you anticipate will emerge in feminist research and development work in the coming years?

While I think that many of the standard demographic questions in the DHS (relating to issues like malaria, child malnutrition and mortality) will continue to be incorporated in other country surveys, such as the Multi-Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) coordinated by UNICEF, I worry about continued data collection of topics that are seen as ‘niche’ or ‘woke.’ This includes modules on gender-based violence, women’s empowerment, women’s decisions over their sexual lives, and men’s attitudes and behaviours about women’s autonomy. For feminist economists and others who understand that these issues are not ‘niche’ or ‘woke’ – but rather core to understanding demographic trends, some child outcomes, economic topics like women’s ability to participate in paid employment or own their houses or accumulate financial assets – losing panel cross-section and panel data is a travesty.

We are seeing sweeping cuts and dismantling efforts across dozens of US federal datasets – from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to the Census Bureau and even climate justice tools. 

As of July 2025, more than 3,000 taxpayer-funded data sets in the US – many congressionally mandated – collected by federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census Bureau, have been affected. One of the first data sets to disappear was the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, an interactive map of US Census tracts “marginalised by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.” The website that hosts the most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment has also gone dark. These websites provide important information to the public, as well as the research community, on public health, poverty, and environmental degradation.

But the issue goes beyond funding cuts and termination of data collection on key topics...

Yes: statistical agencies in the US are losing critical staff due to retirements, especially of senior employees who carry accumulated technical knowledge, and what is called “Reductions in Force (RIF)”, which are employee layoffs. This means that agencies have lost survey enumerators, coders, analysts, quality control personnel, and others who are necessary to curate, validate, and publish statistical series. Technical advisory committees have also been eliminated, including two advisory committees for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Data Users Advisory Committee and BLS Technical Advisory Committee. These Advisory Committees play a key role in methodological innovations for survey design, input on measurement of new challenges, and other technical issues related to employment/unemployment, consumer prices and the cost of living, and time use, among other topics. And, of course, the head of the BLS was recently fired because the US President didn’t like the August jobs numbers.  

 What are the consequences of this erosion for feminist economists and researchers working on intersectional justice, particularly when these datasets are critical to tracking structural inequalities over time?

All of this undermines trust in the federal data ecosystem and compromises the ability of the US government to coordinate around critical policy issues like climate change mitigation and adaption, unemployment, inflation, poverty reduction and social protection, among others. It is a also huge loss for the research community that rely on this data for their own research, but also to hold the government accountable for their commitments and actions. 

The removal of gender identity and DEI-related questions from major federal surveys (such as the National Crime Victimisation Survey or the Annual Business Survey) has deep implications. 

The Executive Order on Defending Women from Gender Ideology, issued in January 2025, has had a devastating effect on several surveys and is one of the most nefarious actions taken to date, because the changes that Agencies are making to their datasets are largely invisible. A recent meta analysis of data manipulation in the US, which gathered data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and Veterans Affairs department, found that 114 of the 232 included datasets were substantially altered. The vast majority of these (106 datasets) had the word gender switched to sex 2, changes which were not made public. The switch from the language of gender to sex is not trivial. It can change the the accuracy of the dataset and the interpretation and conclusions that can be drawn from any analysis of the data. This is particularly important for health interventions carried out by public health agencies the that rely on these data. 

What does this signal in terms of whose lives are being rendered statistically invisible, and how does this impact policy relevance and feminist advocacy?

This is just the tip of the iceberg, as it doesn’t reflect changes in other surveys like the National Crime Victimisation Survey or the Annual Business Survey. Removing response options such as transgender and non-binary, as well as questions on gender have also been removed in the 2025 American Housing Survey (AHS), the Annual Survey of Refugees and Application for Citizenship and Issuance of Certificate Under Section 322. All these changes have implications for use of the data in interventions that target crime or interventions to support business owners that don’t identify as male or female. Most importantly, not only do they render transgender and LGBTQ populations invisible, they also can create stigma and denial of services to these populations.

In your speech at the latest IAFFE conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, you emphasised the importance of shifting from being data users to data advocates. What are the most promising efforts right now to preserve or rescue critical federal datasets? And how can communities like IAFFE, feminist economists, or scholars more broadly, organize effectively to protect this public data infrastructure?

Many efforts are underway to preserve and archive federal data.[1] I hope IAFFE and IAFFE members can join these efforts to move from being only data users to being data advocates. IAFFE members in the US or those who use US data can collect and share stores of how these data benefit all of us. Policy makers need the use cases!  I think it is important to be explicit about the profound value that our economic, health and demographic statistics architecture brings to our research and to policy uptake of that research. IAFFE members can help broadcast efforts to change or destroy important data through their social media channels. And finally, IAFFE can be a stronger voice among other membership organizations – like the American Economic Association or Population Association of America – for how gender data is essential, core to all the issues we work on.

Notes

[1] OEDP has completed archiving about 100 data sets, including the CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the White House’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.  Other good efforts of American Statistical Association, Data Rescue Project, End of Term, archives at IPUMS and University of Michigan.