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As we celebrate Pride Month, we’re reflecting on the deeply interconnected struggles of the LGBTQI+ community and the women’s movement. As International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association Executive Director Julia Ehrt writes, “the ill-treatment of women in our societies and the ill-treatment of LGBTI persons have the same root cause. It is all about sex and gender – and they should be tackled jointly.” This connection is evident in the arguments used in legislation that discriminates against LGBTQI+ people, which often seek to enforce a specific, “traditional” definition of womanhood. This reasoning – which harms all women – is all too familiar to us; it is the very rationale that has been used to limit women’s economic, political and societal participation for centuries.

We know that gender equity is not narrowly limited to equity between men and women. Instead it broadly encompasses the many manifestations of inequity associated with sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics. That means that achieving gender equity requires a thorough understanding of the gender-based barriers that all people face. And that requires accurate, robust and intersectional data on LGBTQI+ people, who are especially likely to experience gender-based discrimination, stereotypes and other barriers. This is particularly true for disabled LGBTQI+ people and LGBTQI+ people of color, who can face discrimination due to their individual identities, as well as at the intersection of multiple identities.

As a gender justice organization, we research and advocate on a variety of issues that disproportionately impact women’s health and economic well-being. These issues include, but are not limited to, increased access to health care, including pregnancy-related care and abortion care; education and employment equity; support for caregiving policies such as paid leave, child care and home- and community-based services for disabled individuals and more. We know that women of different racial and ethnic groups, disability status, immigration status, age, class and other identities are affected by these issues in myriad ways, but we often lack the data to understand the diverse needs of the LGBTQI+ community in detail, across the full spectrum of issues. Three examples below demonstrate that when we have data on LGBTQI+ people, it improves policy not just for this community but for all people – but a lack of data is harmful.

First, we have long advocated for paid family and medical leave, which especially supports women who are more likely to need time off from work to be able to care for their own or a loved one’s medical condition, but who are less likely to have access to paid leave. Over the last decade, research has shown that LGBTQI+ people are especially likely to need paid leave to care for their “chosen family” – someone who is like family to them, but to whom they may not be related by blood or legal ties – and that transgender adults in particular benefit from this definition of family in paid leave laws. Yet the data make it clear that designing the policy to include chosen family benefits everyone; one in seven non-LGBTQI+ adults also report needing paid leave to cover chosen family. LGBTQI+ adults are also parents. For example, we know that 17 percent of respondents to the U.S. Trans Survey, a community survey of more than 92,000 transgender people in the US, report being parents. Having these data has shaped state, local and federal policies on paid leave.

Second, advocates like us observe LGBTQI+ Equal Pay Day in June, but lack the data needed to know how the wage gap impacts LGBTQI+ women in the same way that we know how it impacts other groups of women. The National Partnership has long advocated for policies to close the wage gap, and the existence of quality federal survey data disaggregated by gender and race has been an important advocacy tool to build awareness and campaigns to close the wage gap. These data allowed us to clearly name the problem, to not just say that for every dollar a white man makes, women make less – but how much less, and how much greater the disparity is for women of color. The addition of sexual orientation and gender identity questions to federal surveys like the Household Pulse Survey has allowed us to understand more about economic inequality faced by LGBTQI+ people. For example, within each major racial or ethnic group, LGBT adults report higher rates of food insecurity than non-LGBT adults, and while food insecurity is highest among Black LGBT adults (nearly 21 percent report their household sometimes or often not having enough to eat), the food insecurity gap between LGBT and non-LGBT Asian adults is also particularly stark, but we still need these measures added to the Current Population Survey, which is the central source for our wage gap analysis.

Finally, we have fought tirelessly for access to abortion care. Research shows that the ability to access abortion care has significant economic and health repercussions – and we know that LGBTQI+ people are more likely to experience unintended pregnancies, and that such pregnancies put them at greater risk for violence. Community surveys make clear that LGBTQI+ people – and transgender people in particular – face significant challenges to accessing reproductive health care. For example, the Center for American Progress found 29 percent of transgender or nonbinary people of color were refused reproductive or sexual health services because of their actual or perceived gender identity. Yet analyses regarding the impact of bans or likely bans on abortion are often unable to assess their impact on certain segments of the LGBTQI+ population, as the data are limited to people who identify as women. For example, our analysis of the state-level implications of abortion policies assessed the impacts for disabled women, mothers, women of different racial and ethnic groups and other communities – but we could not include LGBTQI+ people who did not identify as women, nor could we identify impacts for LGBTQI+ people specifically due to limitations in the data.

These three examples illuminate the importance of having inclusive, comprehensive LGBTQI+ data on the full range of policies that address gender equity – as well as some of the consequences when the data fall short. Achieving gender equity and justice in the United States requires identifying and addressing inequities for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and other sexual and gender minority people. Yet the gaps in data about the lives of LGBTQI+ people make it difficult to understand disparities, craft policy solutions and ultimately achieve gender equity for everyone.

In lieu of federal data, the community has stepped up in an attempt to fill these gaps. Last year, the first report from the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey was published. This project was the brainchild of Urvashi Vaid, who “saw clearly that women’s issues were LGBTQ issues and if lesbian, bisexual, and all queer women were not an explicit part of the LGBTQ+ equity policy agenda, that agenda would not be developed in ways that benefited us.” Given the limitations of federal survey data, Vaid launched the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey and surveyed over 8,000 people to shed light on the experiences and needs of LGBTQ+ women.

While we applaud Vaid’s heroic efforts, we know that the community cannot bear the burden of illuminating the disparities they face. The time for comprehensive, inclusive data is now.

The authors are grateful to Molly Kozlowski, Mettabel Law and Gail Zuagar for their contributions to this blog post.