disappearing information on women
May 1, 2004 11:57 AM

Earlier this week, Salon published an article about a report that the US government was slowly and stealthily removing information about women's health and status from various government websites.

You can find the report itself online at National Council for Research on Women's website (report is available as as PDF).

My initial reaction was "OH GOD, NOT BUSH AGAIN", but reading the report made me a bit skeptical. The report itself is couched in such political terms that it loses credibility in my eyes. It sounds as much like a diatribe as like a research document. Couldn't they keep the alarmism in the abstract and make the rest of it more factual? I mean, it reads like someone's blog posts, and someone only slightly more fact-oriented than I (have you ever seen me quote a statistic?). I like to write this way, but if I'm reading research, I would rather see a list of instances of specific information removed or altered and how they might impact people than a list of impacts with some vague references to some things that happened. Parts of the report do that, parts are just spastic.

[Edited after the fact to add... Also of note is that, while every feminist group or mailing list I belong to was Up In Arms about it when the news first broke, I haven't heard word one from anyone on this since. Isn't that odd? It's almost as if we colluded on this one.]