Forced to Quit is a crowdsourced initiative created by Marília Gehrke on June 28, 2024, a few days after winning the Jantina Tammes School Early Career Research Prize in the Netherlands. In its initial wave, this project aims to map women in politics, journalism, and activism who were forced to leave their jobs in the public sphere due to violence, including gendered disinformation. Since this type of information is widespread and hard to find, this project aims to fill this gap by centralizing information and making a database available for researchers and journalists. Gehrke created and has maintained the website financially so far. The technical support for the survey and the map has been provided by the Geodienst team at the University of Groningen. According to the Data Feminism book, which guides this project, only what gets counted counts. Besides accounting for gender, this initiative adds race and ethnicity to the debate, given that women of color tend to be disproportionally affected by violence.
How it started and where we stand
