I Am a Statistic. Just Not in the Way You Think.

Oct 7

2 min read

I am a statistic.

I know how that sounds. We usually hear the word statistic when someone is explaining disadvantage, risk or the odds stacked against a person. And, according to society, I tick a few of those boxes.

Black. Immigrant. Woman. Single mother.

Each of those words can arrive carrying assumptions before I have even entered the room.

But I tick some other boxes too.

Educated. Professional. Magistrate. Award-winning speaker. Founder.

And that is where statistics become interesting. Because both lists are true. Neither list is me.

When the category arrives before the person

Statistics matter. They help us see inequality that individual stories can hide. They show us patterns in health, education, employment, poverty and opportunity. Without them, it becomes very easy to pretend that structural problems are simply a collection of unfortunate individual experiences.

But there is a danger in taking information about a group and quietly turning it into a prediction about a person.

A teacher sees the demographic before the child. An employer sees the accent before the expertise. A leader sees the background before the potential. Sometimes even parents look at the circumstances surrounding their children and begin preparing them for the limitations they expect those circumstances to produce.

That is the moment a useful statistic becomes a ceiling.

The numbers tell us what has happened. Not what must happen.

If people who share my characteristics are statistically more likely to experience a particular disadvantage, that matters. We should ask why. We should examine the systems, opportunities and barriers producing that pattern.

What we should not do is confuse probability with destiny.

The fact that something is more likely does not make it inevitable.

And the fact that somebody has beaten the odds does not mean the odds were fair in the first place.

Both things can be true.

I am still a statistic

I do not want to escape the word statistic. I want to reclaim it.

Because statistics are not only negative.

There are statistics about achievement. About survival. About education. About people building extraordinary lives from unremarkable beginnings. About women leading. Migrants contributing. Single parents raising thriving children. Communities changing what was once considered normal.

I belong in those numbers too.

Perhaps that is the problem with the way we sometimes talk about statistics: we become fascinated by the numbers that describe people's vulnerability and strangely incurious about the numbers that describe their possibility.

Meet the person

This matters far beyond my own story.

It matters in classrooms. It matters in recruitment. It matters in leadership. It matters in parenting. It matters every time somebody with power makes a decision about somebody they believe they already understand.

Know the statistics. They can tell you something important about the world a person is navigating.

Then meet the human being.

Ask what they love. What they can do. What they have survived. What they are learning. What they dream about. What opportunity might unlock in them.

Because a category may explain something about the road behind somebody. It cannot tell you how far they are capable of travelling.

A statistic can describe where someone started without deciding where they finish.