Postscript #12: Counting Absences and Presence

The raison d’être of BehanBox has always been to record absences — of people, of systems, of policies. To make visible what power renders invisible.

Our audiences often describe us as “data-driven.” In recent times, we have been preoccupied with the question — what does data mean for feminist journalism? What counts as evidence?

When it comes to gender and marginality, there is near absence of data itself. Entire lives, labours, and losses go uncounted. While reporting on a series on caste and ASHA workers, our journalist Sarasvati Nagesh discovered that there is no data on the number of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe ASHA workers in the country. And so, we designed a small micro survey of 50 ASHA workers to record their experiences driven by caste. This has the potential to inform frames that can nudge policymakers to collect absent data. As feminist data practitioners remind us, data is never neutral. It reflects the priorities of those who collect it, fund it, and frame it.

Recently, our associate editor Saumya attended the launch of a report on the gig economy and childcare by Mobile Creches. Women gig workers from platforms like Amazon and Urban Company spoke about the impossible trade-offs they navigate daily. A former BluSmart driver described having to constantly upskill in a volatile industry while worrying about childcare. Researchers spoke about the limitations of the Anganwadi centres that do not accommodate erratic gig schedules and workers’ migrant status.

Saumya is now developing a story that takes some of these testimonies as its starting point and sits precisely in these realities that rarely make it into policy conversations dominated by scale, big numbers, and aggregated data. But feminist policymaking must also ask: Under what conditions? For whom? At whose expense? What remains unseen?

In Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein argue that data never “speaks for itself.” They demonstrate how acknowledging emotion can expand our understanding of effective data visualisation, and how recognising invisible labour reveals the vast human work that sustains so-called automated systems. Data feminism, they remind us, is not just about gender —it is about power: who has it, who does not, and how those imbalances can be transformed.

We are constantly fussing over the role of feminist media in evidence making. At another conference at IIIT Delhi, Saumya argued for journalism that makes space for what data does not see — for the textures, contradictions, and lived experiences that resist quantification. If we are serious about building a gender-just ecosystem, feminist media must help dismantle infrastructures of exclusion and instead cultivate infrastructures of care, context, and collaboration, she said. This means changing the questions we ask, expanding what counts as evidence, and rethinking how stories are told. It means recognising lived experience as expertise. It means acknowledging that an indigenous community organiser with decades of embodied knowledge is as much a public intellectual as a tenured academic.

Rethinking data also requires reframing our language. At a recent conference hosted by Dasra Philanthropy Forum, our Head of Strategy, Pallavi Prasad, who was moderating a session on women as climate leaders, was struck by how often the word “resilience” was invoked. We have heard similar praise for the “resilience” of ASHA workers who deliver essential services with minimal pay, protections, or state support. In disaster contexts, too, women’s “resilience” is celebrated as they hold families and communities together. But this vocabulary shifts responsibility. When we glorify resilience, we risk placing the burden of survival on those most failed by the system. We obscure the structural injustice that makes such resilience necessary in the first place. A feminist lens asks not how resilient women are, but why they are forced to be.

At BehanBox, we are at a formative moment where we are ruminating and working towards building a gender-just ecosystem, where journalism becomes a tool for change. What public infrastructures can we build towards this but also how can this feminist thinking, crucial as it is, shape other institutions — philanthropies, unions, community organisations, academic spaces etc?

At BehanBox ChangeLabs, our impact arm, we are actively shaping this public infrastructure – bringing feminist frameworks into rooms where social sector funders decide what gets funded, where academics decide what counts as evidence, and where workers are finally being heard.

This is what we mean when we say journalism as a public good – one that is responsive to inequity. It must belong to people. Communities should see themselves reflected in coverage and have a say in shaping it. To make the invisible visible is not only to document absence. It is to insist on presence. To expand the boundaries of evidence. To challenge the hierarchies of expertise. And to reimagine journalism not as detached observation, but as a collaborative project of justice.

That is the feminist future of the media we are working towards.