Giving Compass' Take:

• Sigal Samuel at Vox discusses "gender data gap," stating that the data our society collects is typically about men’s experience, not women’s, and in effect, most things have been designed with men as a default user. 

• How is it hurting society as a whole? How can donors and activists make an effort to close this gender gap?

• Here's Giving Compass' Gender Equality Guide. 

In the 1983 movie Yentl, the title character, played by Barbra Streisand, pretends to be a man to get the education she wants. She has to change the way she dresses, the timbre of her voice, and much more to get any respect.

In medical lore, the term “Yentl syndrome” has come to describe what happens when women present to their doctors with symptoms that differ from men’s — they often get misdiagnosed, mistreated, or told the pain is all in their heads.

Many, many women have had this experience when they go to the doctor. I had it myself, years ago. As a spate of articles about the phenomenon has come out in the past couple of years, more people have begun talking about a “gender pain gap.”

Even when researchers do gather data from women as well as men in their studies, they often fail to sex-disaggregate it — to separate out the male and female data they’ve collected and analyze it for differences. That’s crucial, because a new pain medication that’s ineffective for men may work great for women, but you’d never know it if you mixed all their data together.

Read the full article about gender data gap by Sigal Samuel at Vox.