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#89: Measuring Matters
Shem Opolot
September 20, 2024
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Happy Friday 🎉 It’s officially sexy light jacket season in D.C., for about five minutes at least, and this means three things: 1) All the fancy clothes I purchased in future tense are thawing, 2) Sometimes you walk into a building when the sun is up, spend 5 minutes inside, and when you walk out, it’s completely dark, and 3) It’s about to get really cold so my friends have started reviving their situationships.
The Life and Work sections are merged today because, well, they are. It’ll make sense when you get there.
LIFE & WORK
Measurement matters.
Copyright 2022 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
What do grapes and building a better society have in common?
In my Health Equity class, someone asked if the prioritization of race and ethnicity in several US data collection tools reinforces the racial divide by centering race.
Well, it’s complicated, but we won’t climb that mountain today.
When you apply for a job in the US, the platform from hell that asks you to upload your CV and then manually fill out your work experience anyway, morphs into an excavator, scoops you up, and pigeonholes you into a box. And there’s no wiggle room in that box. For race, you must choose from: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White.
But why is this imperfect pigeonholing important?
Emily will show you why.
Emily lives in Townsville, one of the most sparsely populated and creatively named towns ever.
This data is fictitious; assume there are many more people in Townsville.
Every five years, the Townsville town council collects data on everyone’s revenue for planning purposes. After looking at the data, they noticed some people, like Emily, made much less money than others. But the town council chalked it up to “Life isn’t fair” or “They are lazy” and implemented uniform public policy.
Five years later, for some [good] reason, the town council collected additional information on gender.
Keep your eyes on Emily.
The town council’s overworked and underpaid data analyst used pivot tables to reveal a newer, thicker plot:
Men in Townsville make twice as much money as women. That year, the town council implemented initiatives for women's economic empowerment.
Five years later, the town council collected additional information on disability status.
Not only are women like Emily more likely to have a disability, but also, people with disabilities make over three times less than people without disabilities:
That year, in addition to the women’s economic empowerment activities, the town council made public spaces and services more accessible for people with disabilities, adding automatic doors, wheelchair ramps, etc.
Five years later, the town council collected data on the level of education, and things got thicker than Tems at the Grammys.
It turned out that if you lived in Townsville and you didn’t have a college degree, you’d make less than half as much as everybody else.
You get the drift.
The scary thing about inequity is it is invisible to the unaffected. Even though the town council finally accommodated Emily, they can’t recoup the 15 years she spent being invisible.
And worse, some people like you or Emily, a young, undereducated woman with a disability, might sit at the intersection of several disadvantages that derail their progress.
Emily is a young, undereducated woman with a disability.
There are two grocery stores within walking distance from my apartment in D.C. At Store A, a bag of grapes costs $3. The same bag of grapes costs $6 at Store B. This would be trivial if I hadn’t shopped at Store B for the last eight months. I noticed the difference when I reviewed the receipts a few days ago.
Townsville couldn’t build a better society for citizens like Emily—and I’d never save on grapes—without measuring things.
You can’t change what you don’t measure.
This is true for public policy, financial discipline, and your habits.
THINGS.
A quote.
Another banger from Caroline.
The person before you did more with less, do more with more.
A picture.
This would be a regular picture of a church at Osu Castle in Accra, Ghana. But…this church sat on top of a tiny dungeon half the size of a nursery school classroom that crammed 60+ slaves inside like produce from the village in the boot of your car.
FUN.
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Shem’s picks
✅ This site can tell you if an image has been altered.
✅ Has anyone ______? This site will give you an answer.
✅ You’re only allowed to use this advice website once.
✅ This site uses the digits of pi to tell time.
✅ Three ways to reduce the harmful effects of stress.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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