Tasked with providing strategies to ensure that federal statistics will cover America’s diversity, The Equitable Data Working Group recently released a blueprint on how government data could be more inclusive.

As reported by CNN, the recommendation of the group includes:

Parse and break down the broader data by demographic areas, such as race and ethnic subgroups, income, geography, sexual orientation and gender identity; increase funding for more federal and independent research and analysis of data that better encompasses minority and marginalized populations; and make the information more accessible, transparent and easy to understand by the general public.

The recommendations also include several budget increase requests to further research and analysis in areas such as health care access, long Covid, and mental health status in historically underserved communities; adding sexual orientation and gender identity questions to the Census Bureau’s largest household survey; and increasing the staffing and capabilities to expand data collection so it includes Middle Eastern and North African heritage and subgroups of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders.