Time use and gender equality at DataFest Tbilisi 2023

The scarcity of gender data and their provision to broad groups of society in accessible, attractive and simple forms is a global challenge. Therefore, UN Women constantly strives to support initiatives that promote the popularization of data. One such initiative is the cooperation with DataFest Tbilisi and the organizing special datathons around various issues of gender equality within the framework of the event.

DataFest Tbilisi is the largest data festival in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and is organized by ForSet. Every year, the event brings together people whose work is related to data science and visualization, including marketers, developers, data analysts, artificial intelligence engineers, designers, journalists and civil activists. Festival guests attend thematic speeches and seminars, and hackathons are held on important issues, among other activities.

This year, DataFest Tbilisi was held for the seventh time, from 9 to 11 November, and one of the datathons held within the event was devoted to time use and gender equality. The participants created multimedia products based on the Time Use Survey in Georgia, which was conducted in 2020–2021 by UN Women together with the National Statistics Office of Georgia, with the support of the Government of Norway. In their work, the participants reflected the important findings of the Time Use Survey that are related to gender equality. After the first stage of the datathon, the five best teams were selected, and the jury ultimately named three winners.

“I had heard about women’s unpaid domestic work before,” said one of the datathon winners, 20-year-old Keso Shapatava, who is a third-year student of visual arts and design at Free University. “I also saw from my personal observations that my female relatives had to constantly put their own desires in the background and spend all their energy on their family. [As for the datathon itself,] I was participating in such a project for the first time, and I was worried because I did not know whether I would be able to cope with the task. [But] finally, I created the illustrations. I think the information provided by visualization will be more memorable to the audience.”

The members of another winning team, Anano Gogichadze and Anano Iluridze, who are also third-year students concentrating in visual communication at the School of Visual Arts, Architecture and Design at Free University, added: “Every day, we see the problem of the unequal distribution of family work, and we wanted to contribute to its solution. We think that such activities play a major role in raising awareness of the problem, because with the right visuals, we are able to attract the attention of more people, [so that] the data are not perceived only as numbers.” The team created a series of infographics using illustrative elements for the datathon.

It should be noted that the authors of the winning concepts, under the mentorship of ForSet and UN Women, will continue to work on their development and finalization, and UN Women will use the final projects for its own communication channels in order to popularize the time use survey data.

The datathon was held within the framework of the UN Women project “Good Governance for Gender Equality in Georgia” (GG4GEG), which is funded by the Norwegian Government. The initiative was supported by the UN Women flagship programme Making Every Woman and Girl Count.