When dealing with oppression, many times we do not realize how much it has sunk into our daily lives and activities without even noticing. In page 23 of the textbook, Data Feminism, when referring to the state of data collection on maternal mortality among black women in the United States, it is referred to as particularly weak. When asked for comment on why that might be the case, CDC Maternal and Infant Health branch chief, William Callaghan, states that “What we choose to measure is a statement of what we value in health,”. Right thereafter the authors of the text,  Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, say that they could edit Callaghan’s statement to refer to Who they choose measure instead of what they choose to measure. I find this to response to mean that D’Ignazio and Klein believe that Callaghan does not deem woman worthy of being measured for the CDC’s data, even if he does not realize it. This by itself is a form of oppression.

Many times in our daily lives we will see forces of oppression when they do not even notice, whether it is a scornful glance at the clothes we wear when looking the other way, or being given different/lesser opportunities based on race/gender/sex/age, oppression can be commonplace in many people’s lives. In the case of the example in the text, D’Ignazio and Klein try to show that Callaghan’s statement was a form of oppression in of itself. By inserting the word “who” instead of “what” into Callaghan’s statement we can see how the statement can seem oppressing, whether he meant it like that or not. An example of the authors explaining the significance of this is the following paragraph when mentioning Serena Williams’ child birth scare. According to them, it was only because someone as high profile as Serena had a problem that attention was only now being brought to the issue. The data collection has been a problem for decades now without many realizing it, and yet even still now, the problem continues.