Ethics and Equity in Data: Lessons from the Data for Everybody Conference
Two days. 14 panelists. 148 attendees.
Yes, we love numbers, but we're particularly excited to share this report from the CTData Virtual Conference 2020. This past Monday and Tuesday (November 9 and 10, 2020), people from across the state and country convened for “Data For Everybody: Ethical Practices, Equitable Solutions.” This conference explored the intersection of data and equity and how data people can support equity in their work.
This was our first-ever virtual conference, and we were thrilled to have more attendees join us than last year’s in-person convening, with a 71% rate of attendance!
If you missed the conference, you can watch day one and day two recorded on CT-N. We also created the notes below to cover the key themes and topics raised during the event. You can also take a look at the #CTDataConf hashtag on Twitter.
Data Points Are People
Bishop John Selders, Executive Director of Moral Monday CT; Assistant Dean of Students at Trinity College: The communities we are seeking to serve through our data work are experts of their own lives. Not everything can be ascertained in the big picture, which is why we must look at the nuances of the data because they represent the multiple facets of people’s experiences.
Bishop Selders: If you cause harm through your data work, first acknowledge, be truthful, and then hold yourself and others accountable to take tangible steps to address the impact.
Building Trust Through Intentional Partnerships
Chavon Hamilton, Executive Director of Hartford Health Initiative: Partner with local experts to build programs together. Data collection should not be the only time of communication. We must be intentional about the information we disseminate back to the community to provide the information needed to help improve their health outcomes.
Ajit Gopalakrishnan, Chief Innovation Officer, Connecticut State Department of Education: Developing a data-sharing system between state agencies helps deliver student assessments, conduct audits, and evaluations of public-funded education programs, and increase access to resources for communities.
Kim Oliver, Director of the City of Hartford’s Department of Families, Children, Youth, and Recreation: Collaborate with youth, parents, and residents for local data sharing efforts to ensure everyone is included at the table. Create a shared data dictionary to ensure values and important identities in the community are incorporated in the data life cycle.
Sue Gallagher, Chief Innovation Officer, Children’s Services Council of Broward County: After establishing a shared data system, CSC Broward found that people who were making decisions about the data were socially and spatially segregated from the people whose data was in the system. The people who were in the data systems were largely people of color, and the data focused on deficits.
Carl Dasse, Senior Data Systems and Evaluation Manager, Children’s Services Council of Broward County: Participatory action research helps center the lived experience of others in data work by sharing power and co-create equity. System professionals and system participants become co-researchers and can create a new, asset-based narrative.
Prioritizing Equity in Our Work
Marie Spivey, Principal at SEET Consultants: Everyone has implicit bias—it’s pervasive. Child health care workers need to recognize bias to provide quality care to families. Reflecting on our own biases is a difficult but necessary process for everyone, no matter their occupation or sector.
Orlando Velazco, Director of the Office of Health Equity, Connecticut Department of Public Health: There is more to determining health than just the length of life. The County Rankings Model takes this into account by weighting length of life and quality of life equally. Social and economic factors also have a major impact on health.
Velazco: How can we reduce the “Unknown” category when reporting data disseminated by race and ethnicity while ensuring data isn’t weaponized? Race categories can hide entire populations and result in missing important insights about how ethnic groups within race groups differ from one another.
Hamilton: Health inequities do not solely impact a person’s health. Health is interconnected with housing, education, employment and many other areas.
Vannessa Dorantes, Commissioner of the Department of Children and Families: Children as young as three are being removed from a setting and tagged as having a behavioral issue when there are other factors that should be reviewed through a clinical lens.
Dorantes: We each need to ask ourselves what it is that we can do within our sphere of influence to move the needle on racially equitable outcomes.
Finn Darby-Hudgens, Director of Operations at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center: The state’s current housing policies are racist and disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic communities. We need to create antiracist policies to address the discriminatory nature of current housing policies.
Gallagher: Learn about the history of racism in the geographical areas we serve and in the systems that we are part of. For example, if we serve children and families in Windham County, where have children and family services come from in the county or state? How did they get to the point where we are now, and what is the racial history of the system? Look to local historians for insights.
The Pandemic Has Worsened Existing Inequities
Beth Bye, Commissioner of the Office of Early Childhood: In addition to funding, child care access is critical. About 44% of Connecticut residents are in a child care desert, and the pandemic only increased this lack of access.
Bye: Child care infrastructure is weak because we don’t value women’s work. The pandemic laid bare how we undervalue child care, even though child care providers stepped up during the pandemic. The pandemic has shown how important child care is in our society.
Melissa Marichal, Staff Attorney at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center: In the middle of a pandemic, many families are facing eviction. In the past two weeks, more than 100 evictions have been filed each week. With eviction moratoriums set to expire December 31, there could be an unprecedented amount of evictions in January 2021.
Kiley Gosselin, Executive Director of the Partnership For Strong Communities: With the state’s projected return to 2019 unemployment levels not until 2023, renter households are more likely to have a housing payment and have all adults employed in occupations with high layoff risk.
Gosselin: Owner-occupied landlords are more likely to be people of color, and landlording is an avenue for small business ownership and to build up home equity that people of color in the United States have been historically denied. Stricter lending standards make it even harder for owners who are already facing pandemic’s challenges.
While our conference focused on data and equity, the conversation is far from over. At CTData, we are committed to applying the valuable lessons gleaned from this event and using it to center equity in our projects, workshops, and partnerships.
We would like to thank our incredible roster of speakers and panelists, as well as all of our attendees who joined us to engage in meaningful discussion around these important issues.
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Being data people, we had to look at the data about who attended the conference. There were a few interesting things.
First, we wondered if there would be a smaller share of attendees given the virtual nature of the conference. We found that 71% of the registrants attended (147) which was comparable to our in-person conference in 2019 with 130 (70%).
This year we asked a voluntary question of registrants about their race and ethnicity and their gender. The racial makeup of attendees changed little between this year and last, with a slightly higher percentage of attendees identifying as Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and White. Additionally, the majority of this year’s conference attendees identified as Female.
Second, we wondered where attendees came from in Connecticut. Given the virtual nature of the conference, would there be more of a spread in the representation of where people work across Connecticut?
There are multiple ways to answer this question. By looking at town representation alone, Hartford and New Haven both were highest in both years. Attendance from the city of Hartford was at 28% in 2020, and from New Haven was 17% in 2020.
County attendance showed a similar picture. Hartford County had the highest representation in both years, followed by New Haven.