As I was studying the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Women in Public Service Project and the Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Index, I decided to research women’s presence in the judiciaries of various countries. In terms of evaluating women’s presence in that domain, presence in the civil service, the attainment of university degrees, and presence in the decision-making civil service could all be important indicators. However, the data present for these indicators was most complete among developed countries. Countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and France had complete data, with which the position of women in both parliamentary houses and the civil service could be established. Concerning countries like Albania, for example, the data was shown to be far from complete, and only GWLI indicators such as the literacy rate, marriage rate, and the presence of women in the civil service were shown. For a country like France, however, the GWLI index included indicators such as women in the civil service, women with post-secondary education, and women in the workforce, thereby demonstrating that the evaluation of such indexes can be limited by the economic development of the country. There is also a distinction concerning women’s presence in a nation’s civil service, as the presence of women in the civil service as a whole is consistently disproportionately larger than the presence of women in “decision making in civil service” roles. As such, many of these nations reflect what the “Roadmap to 50×50: Power and Parity in Women’s Leadership” terms “flat parity,” in that women work in a variety of different capacities, but they are nonetheless largely prevented from obtaining positions of leadership. Furthermore, the presence of women in “decision making in civil service” roles does not adequately reflect the presence of women in the judiciary, as in France, women hold only thirty percent of “decision making civil service” roles while, according to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, women constitute 70.9 percent of the judiciary.
The website of the National Association of Women Judges also furnishes a state-by-state breakdown of women in state-level courts, showing the prevalence of women in the judiciary throughout the United States, and giving a sense of gender equality on a state by state basis. Overall, women constitute only 34 percent of the United States judiciary as of 2019. The United Kingdom also has a low rate of women judges, as a 2019 article in The Guardian, entitled: “Lady Hale: at least half of UK judiciary should be female” by Diane Taylor shows that only 29 percent of judges in lower courts are women, although the number of women judges increases among higher courts. It can be assessed that the disparity between the prevalence of women in parliaments and women in the judiciary can be caused by the necessity of appointments to enter the judicial system. While certain countries may have incentives and policies to ensure gender equality in the court system, such policies may not translate to an effective implementation of policies that foster gender equality at the national level. Furthermore, the different structures of each level of a given judiciary may make certain branches more resistant to change and more independent from the central government. While measuring the presence of women in the judiciary would likely be less challenging than evaluating gender equality in more private aspects of life, such as home life. However, the structural differences between tiers of courts in a country must be contended with, and the prevalence of women at higher levels does not necessarily indicate an increase in gender equality at the national level. While the availability of education and economic freedom may hinder women from entering the judicial system in developing countries, the greatest obstacle in developed countries would seem to be the necessity of appointments to enter the judiciary, and a potential reluctance on the part of local authorities to alter a male-dominated establishment.

The most vivid image I keep from our last seminar session is one of the transforming shape sorting cube. I refer to the analogy of how a search engine creates a result (could we say knowledge?) by using our search questions in the way similar to how a toddler’s cube toy would change the shape of a 2D hole in its surface to fit exactly a 3D object that we try to put inside the cube. I am curious about this idea and would like to know more about how the shapes change.

One question stuck in my mind–perhaps I have not found or created the right-shaped hole to insert it in–is how is the original format in which a text was created/published is taken into consideration in quantitative literary studies? As part of Jim’s question about what quantitative literary studies are, Emma mentioned the need to remove all the “bookness” of a text to conduct the quantitative analysis. But I wonder if that is completely possible to achieve. When a text is created, the format in which it is planned to be distributed should somehow affect its structure, choice of words, and meaning, even if it only by the limitations of length. For example, Charles Dicken’s serialized writing in periodicals will necessarily condition the way he conceived his work and the final result.

Many aspects from Bode’s article seemed unfamiliar to me, but one that I could relate more to was the reference of the histories of transmission and the “infrastructure of knowledge-making” seen as a “process in which meaning is inevitably transformed, if not lost entirely.” Transmitting static knowledge seems difficult to imagine, and I am even skeptical of the possibility that meaning can be completely defined. However, I still find myself aspiring to uncover the real version of a past event or its purest evidence. Is this is not possible, what should we aim for instead?

The readings that we have done so far have demonstrated that data is very much subject to both present and historical biases and as such cannot be taken at face value, nor even be considered reliable and ethical. Lara Putnam, in her article “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast” details the advantages of digitization for researchers, who were previously constrained by archives and their accessibility. However, Putnam notes that despite the convenience that digital research offers, it is still imperative to interpret one’s findings. Putnam references E. H. Carr’s argument that historians often unintentionally select their facts, comparing historical research to a fisherman’s tackle. Putnam notes that this is exasperated by digital methods, stating that “…if the fact is out there anywhere, it will be on your hook in a nanosecond (Putnam 390).”
This is further complicated by the categorization of data by companies controlling search engines and the political implications of certain identities. The chapter “The Future of Knowledge in the Public” from Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression details the ways in which corporations and government institutions often categorize information based on white, Anglo-American male hegemony, leading to racialized categorizations in the Library of Congress, as well as the specific example of google autocorrecting “herself” to “himself as late as 2016 (Noble 6).
The complicated aspects of data and categorization are elaborated upon even further by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein in “Chapter Three: “What Gets Counted Counts,” in Data Feminism. The authors note that something as simple as a user account can be anything but, as such systems, which demand that users categorize themselves, often disregard the identities of non-binary and trans people. Furthermore, D’Ignazio and Klein note that in the case of Facebook, which permits users to write their own identity, users are often categorized as male or female in order to appease potential advertisers. Furthermore, the authors provide an example of a case in which data cannot be transmitted at all, and the implications of such a refusal. The O’odham Nation of the Southwestern United States was unable to provide the United States government with details about the locations of burial grounds, as such knowledge constituted sacred knowledge. Therefore, the United States destroyed many burial grounds in order to construct a border fence.
Joanna Radin, in “ ‘Digital Natives’: How Medical and Indigenous Histories Matter for Big Data” demonstrates that the people of the Pima Gila River Indian Community, while they have assisted in and furnished the data for medical studies since the early twentieth century, did not retain any control over the data they provided. Kimberly Christen, however, shows a way in which this could be corrected in her article “Relationships, Not Records: Digital Heritage and the Ethics of Sharing Indigenous Knowledge Online.” She demonstrates that several indigenous nations, while generating their own digital archives, often include specific conditions on the access and use of the data, thereby retaining control over their own information. In this light, while data and its categorization may be inherently problematic, it is possible that data and its categorization may be adapted to better reflect the people who actually provide it.