Speech by Commissioner Lahbib on Equality Data

Like many of you, I love music. Pop, jazz, rap, classical. You name it. One of my favourite artists is Rachmaninoff.

Sometimes when I am listening to his music, what catches my attention is not the sound. It is the silence between the notes. Music is not only made of the notes we hear. It is also shaped by the notes that are not played. Take away those silences, and you change the music.

Our societies have silences too, and so do the data we use to make decisions about people's lives. These silences are the people who never show up in our data, the lives that disappear inside an average, the inequalities we simply cannot see.

Sometimes, the most important thing a dataset can tell us is not who is there. It is who is missing.

Five years ago, this Roundtable met for the first time. Back then, you asked a basic question: do we have the data we need to understand inequality in Europe? Today, we can ask a more ambitious one: how do we make sure the data we collect actually help us build a more equal Europe?

Look around this room at all the different voices here today. That alone shows how far we have come. But there is still more to do.

The Commission set up the Expert group on equality data in 2018 because of a simple problem: we cannot tackle discrimination if we cannot see it. The Group brought together Member States, the Commission, Eurostat, FRA, EIGE and Eurofound. It gave us a place to compare notes and find solutions together.

Its Guidelines were an important milestone. They moved the debate from whether equality data should be collected to how we can collect and use them responsibly. Our first Roundtable in 2021 helped us challenge some persistent myths.

One myth was that collecting information on ethnic origin, disability, or sexual orientation is incompatible with data protection. It is not. Europe's data protection rules protect people. They do not prevent responsible equality data collection.