In this post, Dr Lewis Smith discusses data classification and the gendering of consumption through the lens of market research conducted by rail companies in the 1970s.
Data categories seem logically constructed. In reality, they aren’t just logically constructed, they are built on centuries of history, culture, politics and society. It is only by understanding south africa rcs data how these forces work together that we can truly understand the implications of a dataset.
In June 2022, Dave Rawnsley wrote an article for the UK Data Service Data Impact Blog on changes to census definitions and concepts over fifty years. As it went on to state, ‘these rules were developed in consultation with interested Government Departments, the Royal Statistics Society, the Market Research Society and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.’
Whilst new for the Census, and represented an important economic, political and sociological category, capable of embodying both power and oppression for a number of people in Britain. First and foremost, the ’Housewife’ was an economic innovation which was ‘invented’ as a consumer in the 1950s by marketeers to sell household products. The “housewife” had come to symbolise the stability of Britain’s working class families. Of course, this was captured by one of the most powerful housewives in post-war Britain, Margaret Thatcher, who made much of this symbolic status. She carefully crafted her image as a housewife by being pictured performing the duties of a housewife, washing up, making breakfast, cooking, to show her ‘ordinary’ side.[2] In politics, the “home economy” was just as important as, if not more important than, the British economy.