Definition: Data Injustice

Data injustice can occur in a variety of ways. In the context of environmental justice, one of the most important questions for evaluating whether data injustice is present is: do stakeholders have the data they need to understand and respond to environmental hazards in this setting? For example, if workers in a factory do not know the health risks of prolonged exposure to the chemicals they work with every day (or even whether they have been exposed), that is an example of data injustice.

Data injustice can also refer to ways that data contributes to other forms of injustice through a failure to adequately represent the world. This might occur through miscounting the people affected by an issue (see this article about the 2020 Census under- and over-counting population), prioritizing one issue over another just because more people are affected, or privileging one form of data over another (for example, statistics over qualitative accounts of a problem).