The Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality is dedicated to the social sciences and working towards the betterment of society. One of the ways in which we do this is through leveraging technology. This includes the use of big data; enter: computational social science. The use of large data sets (regarding women’s empowerment, education, health, social issues, politics, the environment, economics, and so many other fields) combined with the processing powers of machine learning will enable us to understand at greater depths the larger forces at play.

By unlocking these insights we will be able to better target our social interventions to have the greatest impact upon society, as well as potentially predict both negative and positive outcomes of various interventions. As our goal has to do with women and gender, specifically, we hope to be able to utilize large data sets to understand the elements at play in inequality, lack of equity, and to also neutralize the negative events of violence against women, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and child pornography (to name a few of the many).